SAP Trigger versus Email

Part 1 - Autengruber

Indirect usage is not a trigger in the SAP world. SAP still cannot detect this usage with surveying tools. However, SAP has an excellent command of polite inquiries via mails.

Anyone who provides information here carelessly may even be in violation of the EU GDPR. Proper triggers are the SAP survey requests for audit, the need to relicense an inventory product, the Hana database, an S/4 Hana product on premise or in the cloud. In three consecutive articles, a best practice will be recorded here, Trigger 1 - SAP Audit:

1. check exactly what is being measured: Which installations? Which systems? What are the differences from the previous year? The SAP measurement prompt in the PDF makes it difficult to compare.

Workaround: Transfer to Excel. Clarify with SAP whether and why the scope has been extended compared to the previous year, and agree the scope and a schedule with SAP in writing in advance.

2. check what and how deep SAP may audit and which tools SAP prescribes. Check what obligations and rights you have when surveying. Customers of Business Suite Applications must be measured differently than those of Business Suite.

3. which engines are read out? Are they chargeable or included in basic packages? Are they indicators or values? Are they absolute values or values to be corrected mathematically?

A deep knowledge of all survey identification numbers and their references, enhancement packs lists, and how to assess whether an EhP is chargeable or free is an advantage here.

4. comparison of the results with the previous year's figures. What has changed and how? Why is this the case? Is the change consistent with my forecast? Can the change be explained? What do my benchmarks look like for this?

5. sending the original results. Where there are discrepancies, actively point them out to SAP and invite them to a dialog. Only those who deliver correct results can expect a correct post-purchase proposal from SAP. This should always be zero, because we all assume that we are compliant.

Those who do all this before the survey request will not get stressed. Those who don't may get a post-purchase proposal later due to incorrect or not considered information to SAP, even if they are compliant.

Part 2 - Dyer

For many years, the SAP user association DSAG has complained about an overly complex SAP price list. SAP's price and conditions list (PKL) comes in a colorful Excel format, but numerous columns and different metrics ultimately turn the PKL into an almost unmanageable set of numbers - but the SAP community has become accustomed to, if not accepted, this PKL challenge.

The efforts of the DSAG thus remain a battle against windmills for the time being. As E-3 author Stefan Autengruber now publicly presents for the first time, measuring an SAP system appears to be an even more complex task!

Surveys can also take place several times a year. Normally, the SAP CoE manager receives an invitation to a survey once a year. This means that the questionnaire from colleague Autengruber (see left column) is immediately applicable.

Naturally, there are numerous technical questions to be clarified in the run-up to any survey and perhaps also to bring one's own system back into a "compliant" status at short notice.

Why? It could be that one user too many is stored in the system - of course only temporarily, because someone was working here for a few days on a trial basis.

However, there are said to be cases where SAP preferred to conduct system surveys in the summer, when it is highly likely that a few interns will be present for a month or two.

Ultimately, this is only a few users more or less and a solution was still found for this at the round table. The complexity of SAP's licensing metrics and the almost quarterly adaptation of the SAP GTCs are much more serious.

Whether compliant or not no longer matters when apples and oranges are compared - when data from a survey last year is no longer comparable to a current license survey because license and engine metrics have changed massively.

How does an existing SAP customer react to retroactive additional claims? Because there is no time dimension in SAP's surveying tools. From a purely legal point of view, new GTCs do not apply retroactively, but a confusing situation quickly arises if it is unclear when which license was purchased with which GTCs valid at the time. With the appropriate historical knowledge, however, many post-purchase suggestions can be ruled out.