A global oil and gas major rebuilt a LAW consolidation across nine production systems, deduplicated cross-system users on employee identifier, reclassified on activity evidence, and saved $11.8M against an audit claim.
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The oil and gas major ran SAP across nine production systems covering upstream operations, downstream refining, retail distribution, corporate functions, and an IS-OIL deployment for the petroleum value chain. The audit cycle opened with a LAW consolidation request and returned a claim of $14.6M against an over-licensed Named User position across the consolidated landscape.
The consolidated user count was 29,200 against a contracted entitlement of 18,400, a stated overage of 10,800 users. The Professional-band overage alone accounted for $9.4M of the claim. The remaining $5.2M came from a mix of band reclassification disputes and indirect-access exposure on the IS-OIL retail integration.
The internal SAM team had not run a parallel consolidation prior to the LAW submission. The CFO engaged us to validate the claim, rebuild the consolidation, and defend the position against the SAP measurement.
We rebuilt the consolidation with three explicit defensive measures: employee-identifier deduplication across the nine systems, contractual scope mapping for the IS-OIL retail integration, and twelve-month activity-based band reclassification across the full consolidated population.
The deduplication step removed approximately 6,800 duplicate user records, reducing the headline count from 29,200 to 22,400. The IS-OIL retail integration scope correction removed an additional 2,200 retail station operators from the named-user count under a documented retail-operations exemption clause in the contract. The remaining 20,200 users went through the band reclassification step.
The reclassification moved approximately 4,800 users from Professional to Limited Professional, 1,400 users from Limited Professional to Employee Self-Service, and identified 800 dormant accounts for retirement. The final reclassified count was 19,400 against the 18,400 contracted entitlement — an overage of 1,000 users against the original claimed 10,800.
Four tactics carried the defence from the opening $14.6M claim to the settled $2.8M position.
We rebuilt the LAW consolidation with employee-identifier deduplication across the nine systems. The corrected count was 22,400 against the LAW-submitted 29,200. Every duplicate was documented in a per-user evidence file with the system-by-system presence and the employee identifier match.
The IS-OIL contract includes a retail-operations exemption clause covering field station operators who interact with the IS-OIL retail layer through dedicated mobile interfaces. We documented the 2,200 retail operators against the clause and excluded them from the named-user count. SAP accepted the exclusion after one round of clarification.
We rebuilt the band assignments on twelve months of transaction evidence across the deduplicated and scoped population. The reclassification moved 4,800 users down from Professional, 1,400 from Limited Professional, and retired 800 dormant accounts. The evidence pack documented per-user activity.
A $1.8M component of the original claim related to indirect access on the retail integration. We documented the integration architecture and the Digital Access document categories actually consumed. The settled position converted the indirect-access claim to a Digital Access entitlement at a discounted unit price.
The claim closed at $2.8M against the opening $14.6M, an eighty-one per cent reduction. The settlement combined a 1,000-user Named User overage purchase at $1.6M, a modest Digital Access entitlement at $0.9M, and a $0.3M settlement of administrative dispute items.
The contract amendment formalises the cross-system deduplication methodology, the retail-operations exemption clause, and the Digital Access measurement framework. The amendments carry forward as the standard for future audit cycles.
The internal SAM function adopted a quarterly LAW preparation cycle with continuous deduplication and band-evidence maintenance. The audit-readiness package now includes the deduplication evidence, the scope mappings, and the per-user activity baseline.
The opening claim looked terminal. The rebuild reduced it by four-fifths. The deduplication did most of the work; the reclassification finished it.
End-to-end audit defence on LAW-consolidated landscapes, including deduplication rebuilds and indirect-access conversions.
Read the brief →Cross-system consolidation methodology, employee-identifier deduplication, and quarterly evidence cadence.
Read the brief →The LAW consolidation mechanics, cross-system deduplication, and industry-solution scope exemptions.
The full pre-submission checklist for a defensible LAW consolidation across multi-system landscapes.
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