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SAP Licensing Quick Guide

This article will describe the basic SAP licensing model, its difficulties, and how SAP customers typically handle the issue of licensing. In order to keep it simple, we will not include a discussion of “engines” (e.g., payroll, etc.), which are additional components that are charged separately, on top of the basic licensing fees.

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Understanding The SAP Contract

This how to guide is designed for you to gain greater insight to your SAP contract and provides you with a simpler explanation on some keys sections. When companies purchase software from SAP, they are required to sign a contract as they would with any other software vendor. This contract defines a lot of issues like what the exact software is that they’re buying and what exactly is included in the purchase. For our purposes, the contract is also what defines the licensing structure. As this is a practical document about SAP license optimization and not a legal-oriented document, we will only highlight the most important topics for our perspective, which is to understand the relevant contract parts for future negotiations.

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Control GRC and SoD: It’s Your Duty

Companies of all kinds and sizes are focusing more and more on finding the most adequate GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) and SoD (Segregations of Duties) solutions. Why? Failure to comply with GRC and SoD requirements can affect a business severely. SoD basically means ensuring that more than one person is required for completing a task within an organization. Today, companies understand the critical role SoD plays. Specifically, when dealing with finance and sensitive information, SoD has become a key factor for gaining control and confidence in a business environment, as well as in assisting companies to successfully pass audit inspections. By complying with SoD rules an organization reduces the likelihood of fraud, significantly.
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Granting The Right Authorizations to Your Users

Hypothetical situation - say you’re the authorization manager – either a SAP authorization manager or a general authorization manager and you need to grant authorizations to users. Now this isnt really your actual job but it was delegated to you by someone who said, "Hey, you can grant authorizations to users, it’s really not that complicated". In fact, it is really quite simple; technically it is just to add the right authorization to the user. Now, say someone is filling out paperwork requesting the authorization for MM01 (to create materials) – you would search for one authorization role that includes this activity (out of 50 possible options) and grant it. That’s it, right? Good job?!
No, not really. Let me show you the correct way to grant authorizations.

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Preparing For SAP Audits

This How To Guide is a bit different than most document you have seen in the past, because we feel there isn’t anything better than hearing from actual customers. This is a collection of select tips, tricks, and advice that have been gathered from our customers who continuously pass one licensing audit after the next, and are well prepared at all times. These customers are continuously checking their licensing status and constantly optimizing it according to changes that occur at their companies.


SAP audits can be time-consuming and a drain on your resources. If you are not prepared, you can spend weeks combing through the data. Once you have completed all the data mining and prepare your report, do you know what risks you have or have identified risks you didn’t know existed? If you follow these tips from our actual customers, you will be one step closer in preparation for your next audit.

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5 Little-Known Facts About SAP Licensing

Although they are spending millions of dollars, many SAP customers do not really know what licenses they actually have, what licenses they really need, and what they don’t.

SAP is one of the most expensive software systems in the market, yet many organizations still treat their SAP licensing like a black box; they see it in terms of input and output without any knowledge of how it works. We were shocked to find some customers that felt that their SAP licensing was an invincible force that they were powerless against.

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GRC Compliance: Offense or Defense?

When it comes to handling GRC conflicts, is it better to use an alerting tool or a simulation tool? They both manage conflicts, but one is predictive and the other happens after the fact. Well, there is no one solution; the key is to use them in combination to promise a peaceful process and clean GRC audit report.

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What Every SAP Security Manager Should Know

If you’re in the SAP Security field you should know that with a complex application like SAP, it is really not sufficient to only secure the communication and only prevent people from logging in from external IPs. The “big money” lies in the data: an employee who commits fraud or sells sensitive customer data to the outside can generate a huge financial loss for the company, not to mention possible law suits and negative impact from bad PR.

Using ProfileTailor Dynamics for SAP Security you can:

  • Monitor user activity and pinpoint suspicious and sensitive actions
  • Get alerts about irregular activity that could potentially lead to fraud
  • Prevent risks before they happen by identifying unused sensitive authorizations and eliminating them
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Negotiate The Possibilities with SAP

Believe it or not, SAP wants you to be its customer. Moreover, SAP wants you to be a satisfied customer so that your company will purchase other SAP management solutions in the future. If you have always assumed that negotiating SAP contracts is impossible (as impossible as negotiating contracts with a bank, utility provider, cell phone operator), then assume again.
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5 Misconceptions about SAP Authorizations

The brief mentions some very naive statements we’ve heard during our experience in the field. The following quotes are definitely myths, and we highly suggest that you familiarize yourself with them in case you hear them too.
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