A global retailer running a Central User Administration deployment across eleven SAP satellites corrected a duplicate-counted audit claim, rebuilt the LAW consolidation, and removed seventy-four per cent of the opening demand.
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The retailer ran a Central User Administration topology across one S/4HANA system and ten ECC satellites covering separate country and brand deployments. The audit cycle opened with a request for LAW consolidation across the full landscape. The retailer ran the consolidation through the standard transaction and submitted the resulting file to SAP, expecting a routine measurement cycle.
Three weeks later, SAP returned an opening claim of $7.4M against an under-licensed Named User position. The claim cited an excess of 3,600 users above contracted entitlement, primarily in the Professional band. The retailer's internal SAM team escalated to the CFO and engaged us to validate the claim before responding.
The CUA topology was the analytical lever. CUA propagates user records across child systems, and any user authorised on more than one satellite gets counted in the LAW consolidation unless the consolidation correctly applies cross-system deduplication. We tested whether the consolidation had been done correctly.
The submitted LAW consolidation contained the standard LAW output with cross-system aggregation. We ran a parallel consolidation against the same source data with an explicit deduplication routine that matched users on employee identifier rather than on user-record identifier. The deduplicated count was 14,200 users against the LAW-reported 17,800 — a difference of 3,600 users, exactly matching SAP's claimed excess.
The arithmetic was direct. The LAW output had been counting cross-system users multiple times. The audit claim was an artefact of the consolidation methodology rather than an actual licensing exposure.
We documented the duplication in a per-user evidence file showing each duplicated user with the satellite-by-satellite presence, the employee identifier match, and the corrected single-user assignment. The evidence was presented to SAP with a request to revise the audit position against the deduplicated count.
Four tactics carried the engagement from the $7.4M opening claim to the $1.9M settled position.
We rebuilt the LAW consolidation with explicit deduplication on the employee identifier across all eleven satellites. The corrected user count was 14,200 against the LAW-submitted 17,800. The evidence pack documented every deduplication match with a system-by-system presence table.
Within the 14,200 deduplicated users, we ran a band reclassification on twelve months of transaction evidence. The reclassification moved 2,400 users from Professional to Limited Professional and 800 users from Limited Professional to Employee Self-Service. The reclassification accounted for a further $2.1M of the reduction.
The deduplicated population included 1,100 dormant accounts with no login activity in twelve months. We retired the accounts as part of the response, removing them from the chargeable population.
We negotiated an amendment defining the LAW consolidation methodology for the retailer's CUA landscape, including the deduplication approach and the employee-identifier matching basis. The amendment carries forward as the agreed methodology for future audit cycles.
SAP accepted the deduplicated count and the band reclassification. The claim closed at $1.9M against the opening $7.4M, a seventy-four per cent reduction. The contractual amendment on CUA consolidation methodology removes the duplicate-counting risk from future cycles.
The retailer's internal SAM function adopted the deduplication routine as part of the quarterly LAW preparation cycle. The methodology runs against the live employee identifier table rather than the LAW output, providing a continuously maintained baseline rather than a per-audit rebuild.
The $1.9M settled position remediated through a combination of true-up purchases and reclassification credits. The retailer's contracted Named User entitlement post-settlement provides approximately 800 users of headroom for the next acquisition cycle.
The audit claim was real. The duplication was also real. We had to prove the second before the first stopped being a problem.
Self-measurement preparation, CUA consolidation rebuilds, and employee-identifier deduplication across multi-satellite estates.
Read the brief →End-to-end audit response on CUA-consolidated landscapes and the analytical work behind the deduplication evidence.
Read the brief →How the LAW consolidation works, where it duplicates, and how CUA topologies inflate the count.
The full pre-submission checklist for a defensible LAW consolidation across multi-satellite landscapes.
How a global media group removed $5.1M from a pending audit claim through transaction-evidence reclassification.
It is the opening position of a negotiation. Speak with a specialist before responding. The first conversation is at no cost and under privilege.
Further reading from the firm: the USMM and LAW measurement pillar and the oil and gas LAW consolidation case.
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