A global retail group was quoted 12,200 FUE on a RISE migration. The activity-based rebuild landed it at 8,400. The annual subscription dropped $4.2M before any discount negotiation.
Every result on this site is anonymised at the client’s request. Specific figures are real and verifiable through a confidentiality-protected reference call arranged on request.
The retailer had been in discussion with SAP about a RISE with SAP private-cloud migration for nine months. The SAP-led FUE conversion proposal landed at 12,200 FUE, with a corresponding annual subscription value of approximately $13.8M at list. The proposal had been built from a role-collection mapping applied to the existing ECC user base.
The retailer’s internal IT leadership had budget approval for a RISE conversion at approximately $10M annually. The gap between the SAP-led quote and the internal budget was $3.8M annually, or roughly $19M over the five-year contract term. The CFO had asked for an independent review of the FUE math before authorising signature.
We were engaged with a brief to rebuild the FUE conversion math from activity evidence. The engagement was specifically scoped as a sizing brief, not a contract negotiation — the priority was the correct FUE number, not the price.
SAP’s proposed RISE conversion landed at 12,200 FUE. The breakdown by FUE tier indicated which components of the mapping were vulnerable to evidence-based rebuild and which were not.
Four tactics, applied across the user population and the conversion methodology. Each tactic produced a documented FUE-component adjustment.
The 9,400 users mapped to Core FUE were re-examined against twelve months of transaction activity from the ECC estate. Of those, 3,400 had no Core-tier activity and were moved to Self-Service. A further 1,200 had only ESS-style activity and were also moved to Self-Service. The Core FUE count moved from 9,400 to 4,800.
The 2,100 users tagged for Advanced FUE were re-examined against the published Advanced FUE definitions. Of those, 1,300 had no transactional activity that required the Advanced tier. The remaining 800 were confirmed at Advanced. The Advanced FUE count moved from 2,100 to 800.
The Self-Service FUE pool was rebuilt to capture the users moved out of Core and Advanced. The consolidated Self-Service count landed at 2,800, against the original 700. The expansion was supported by documented activity profiles per user.
We identified 1,800 named users in the ECC estate with no transactional activity over the twelve-month measurement window. The 1,800 were retired ahead of the conversion. The retirement removed dormant-user inflation from the FUE conversion baseline.
The final RISE FUE conversion landed at 8,400: 4,800 Core, 800 Advanced, and 2,800 Self-Service. The conversion came in 31% below the SAP-led mapping of 12,200 FUE.
The annual subscription value moved from $13.8M to $9.6M at list, a $4.2M annual reduction before any discount negotiation. The negotiated final price landed inside the internal IT budget by approximately $400K annually.
The RISE contract included an annual remeasurement clause with a documented activity-based methodology, replacing the role-collection mapping as the basis for future FUE adjustments. The clause protects the retailer from FUE inflation 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, HR, and BW modules. The RISE FUE definitions were applied at the activity level rather than the role-collection level, in line with SAP’s published FUE classification guidance. The dormant retirement used a combined criterion of last-login date and transaction-history activity, with both criteria required to be inactive for the user to be retired. The remeasurement clause negotiated into the contract follows the same activity-based methodology, ensuring methodological continuity across the five-year contract term.
The SAP-led conversion was eighteen million dollars more expensive over the contract term. The rebuild took twelve weeks. That is the cheapest twelve weeks we ever spent.
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 retailer renegotiated a RISE contract mid-term and rebuilt the FUE structure for $5.4M annual savings.
Further reading: related white paper · cluster pillar · topic page
An audit notification is not an invoice. It is the opening position of a negotiation. The first conversation is at no cost and under privilege.
Contact Us →Every Wednesday. Field reports from active matters, decoded SAP communications, and what to look for in the next audit cycle. Work email only.