An industrial manufacturer was quoted 8,500 FUE on a RISE conversion. The rebuild work landed it at 5,600. The annual subscription dropped $3.6M before discount negotiation, then a further $0.9M after.
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The manufacturer had been negotiating a RISE conversion for fourteen months. The SAP-led FUE conversion landed at 8,500 FUE, with a corresponding annual subscription value of $10.2M at list. The proposed t-shirt-sizing tier carried inflation triggers that would expand the FUE pool annually based on user-count growth.
The internal IT leadership had budget approval for a RISE conversion at approximately $7.5M annually for a five-year term. The gap between the SAP quote and the internal budget was $2.7M annually. The board had asked for an independent FUE-conversion review before authorising the contract.
We were engaged on a sizing brief: rebuild the FUE conversion math, identify the inflation triggers in the contract structure, and produce a defensible final FUE position. The engagement excluded direct contract negotiation, which the manufacturer’s external counsel would handle separately.
SAP’s proposed RISE conversion landed at 8,500 FUE, with t-shirt-sizing tiers that triggered automatic expansion on user-count growth. The opening required defence on both the absolute count and the expansion mechanism.
Four tactics, applied to the FUE count and the t-shirt sizing structure. Each tactic produced a documented reduction or structural change.
The 6,400 users mapped to Core FUE were re-examined against twelve months of transaction activity. Of those, 2,400 had no Core-tier activity and were moved to Self-Service. A further 600 were retired as inactive ahead of the conversion. The Core FUE count moved from 6,400 to 3,400.
The 1,600 users tagged for Advanced FUE were re-examined against the published Advanced FUE definitions. Of those, 900 had no transactional activity requiring Advanced. The remaining 700 were confirmed. The Advanced FUE count moved from 1,600 to 700.
The Self-Service FUE pool was rebuilt to capture users moved from Core. The consolidated Self-Service count landed at 1,500 against the original 500. Activity profiles were documented per user.
The contractual expansion trigger was rewritten to apply only on documented activity-based user growth, not on raw user-count growth. The amendment eliminates the automatic expansion exposure from adding inactive users to the directory during the contract term.
The final RISE FUE conversion landed at 5,600: 3,400 Core, 700 Advanced, and 1,500 Self-Service. The conversion came in 34% below the SAP-led mapping of 8,500 FUE.
The annual subscription value moved from $10.2M to $6.6M at list, a $3.6M annual reduction before discount negotiation. A further $0.9M was negotiated off during contract close, landing the final price at approximately $5.7M annually — inside the internal IT budget by $1.8M.
The contract included two structural amendments alongside the FUE rebuild: (1) the rewritten t-shirt expansion trigger limiting expansion to activity-based growth, and (2) an annual remeasurement clause with documented methodology. The amendments protect the FUE position over the five-year contract term.
The activity-based FUE rebuild used twelve months of ECC transaction history, with each user mapped to their actual activity profile across the FI, MM, SD, PP, and HR modules. The RISE FUE definitions were applied at the activity level rather than the role-collection level. The dormant retirement used a combined last-login and transaction-history criterion, with both criteria required to be inactive for the user to be retired. The rewritten t-shirt expansion trigger uses the same activity-based methodology, ensuring that contractual expansion is tied to documented user value rather than to raw directory growth. The methodology was documented and reviewed by external counsel before contract signature.
The conversion math was the easy part. The hard part was the expansion trigger that nobody had read. The amendment that fixed the trigger saved more over five years than the FUE rebuild did in year one.
Conversion math, FUE remapping, and the migration-stage compliance work that protects the renewal economics.
Read the brief →Post-audit settlement structuring and contract amendment work. Where the protections that prevent the next audit are written into the next renewal.
Read the brief →FUE conversion math, hyperscaler clauses, and the renewal leverage points.
The bundled landing pad for on-premise customers. The licensing model, the contract structure, and the renewal mechanics.
How a global retailer reduced RISE FUE by 31% on conversion through activity-based remapping.
Further reading: related white paper · cluster pillar · topic page
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