European Manufacturer Saves $8M on SAP Support Through License Optimization and Third-Party Maintenance

The Challenge

The client, a mid-market industrial manufacturer with operations across Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, had been running SAP ECC 6.0 since 2009. The SAP estate had grown organically through acquisitions and departmental expansions, resulting in a licensed footprint that substantially exceeded the organisation's actual operational requirement. Annual SAP Enterprise Support fees were calculated at 22% of the total net license value — a figure that had never been challenged despite significant changes to the business over fifteen years.

Three specific pressures converged to prompt action. First, SAP announced its standard 5% support fee increase for 2025, adding approximately $135,000 to the already-inflated annual bill. Second, the company's CIO confirmed that S/4HANA migration was at minimum three to four years away, meaning the business would pay for SAP Enterprise Support across an entire strategic period for a platform delivering no net innovation value in that timeframe. Third, an internal audit of SAP named user licences identified that roughly 28% of provisioned users had not logged into the SAP system in over 12 months — a clear indication of accumulated shelfware.

The finance director's mandate was unambiguous: identify and extract maximum supportable savings from the SAP estate without disrupting business operations or creating compliance exposure. The question was not whether to act, but how to act strategically enough to maximise the savings without triggering an SAP compliance review that could negate the gains.

The Approach

Redress Compliance was engaged to conduct a full SAP license and support cost optimisation review. The engagement operated in three sequential phases, each building on the findings of the previous.

Phase 1: License Entitlement and Usage Analysis

A comprehensive review of the company's SAP license entitlements was conducted against actual system usage data extracted from the SAP License Administration Workbench (LAW). The analysis covered all named users across ECC 6.0, BW, and BusinessObjects, cross-referencing login activity, transaction usage, and role assignments against the contracted license categories.

The findings were significant. Of the 4,850 named user licenses under active contract, approximately 2,400 — nearly half — fell into one of three categories: users who had not authenticated in over 12 months, users whose actual transaction footprint mapped to a lower-cost license category than they were provisioned under, or users associated with business units that had been divested or absorbed in previous acquisitions. In addition, the BusinessObjects environment contained 340 licenses provisioned for a reporting project that had been replaced by a third-party analytics tool two years earlier, yet continued to attract annual support costs.

The actionable licence reduction — the number of licences that could be safely retired or downgraded without operational impact — totalled 2,400 named user licences and the full BusinessObjects estate. This represented 31% of the total contracted licence value and translated directly into a proportional reduction in annual SAP support fees.

Phase 2: SAP Support Renegotiation and Third-Party Maintenance Evaluation

With a clean and defensible licence position established, the engagement team prepared for parallel negotiations with SAP and with third-party maintenance (TPM) providers. The dual-track approach was deliberate: engaging SAP with documented evidence of licence rationalisation while simultaneously receiving binding commercial proposals from Rimini Street and Spinnaker Support created genuine competitive pressure on SAP's commercial team.

SAP's initial response to the licence reduction notice was to propose a three-year price lock at the reduced base — a standard retention tactic. The TPM proposals, meanwhile, offered support coverage at approximately 50% of SAP's adjusted annual fee, with service level commitments that matched the client's operational requirements. The business case for third-party maintenance was further strengthened by the confirmed S/4HANA migration timeline of three to four years: SAP Enterprise Support provides the greatest value to customers actively consuming SAP innovation; for a stable ECC estate approaching end-of-life, it delivers substantially less.

The client elected to migrate to third-party maintenance for all SAP application and database modules. SAP was notified in accordance with contractual notice provisions, and the transition was structured to ensure continuous coverage with no gap between SAP support termination and TPM activation.

Phase 3: Transition and Governance

The final phase covered the operational transition to TPM, including documentation of the licence position at the point of SAP support termination, establishment of a licence governance framework to prevent shelfware recurrence, and a forward-looking plan for managing the eventual S/4HANA migration from a contracted TPM position — including the commercial terms under which the client could exit TPM and re-engage SAP support when the migration timeline became firm.

The Outcome

Key Takeaways

• Shelfware accumulates silently and at significant cost. The 28% unused licence rate identified in this engagement is not unusual. Organisations that have grown through acquisition or have not conducted a formal SAP licence audit within the past three years are likely carrying comparable hidden costs. Every unused licence is paying 22% per year to SAP for no return.
• Third-party maintenance is a credible option for stable ECC estates. For organisations confirmed to be three or more years from S/4HANA migration, the economics of SAP Enterprise Support versus third-party maintenance are difficult to justify. Providers such as Rimini Street and Spinnaker Support offer genuine 50% cost reductions with service levels appropriate to stable, non-innovation ECC environments.
• The dual-track negotiation approach unlocks better outcomes from SAP. Presenting SAP with both a documented licence reduction and active TPM proposals fundamentally changes the commercial dynamic. SAP's retention offers improve materially when the alternative is a confirmed TPM migration rather than a hypothetical one.
• Compliance protection is essential when rationalising licences. Retiring licences without rigorous documentation against system usage data creates audit exposure. The correct sequence is: establish the clean licence position first, document it thoroughly, then execute the commercial changes.