Six ways to optimize your licenses to save money with SAP Audit
One of the major expenses for the SAP Clients is the licensing cost which is incurred for having users in the system. One aspect in the licensing calculation is the number users in the system. SAP also charges the clients based on the number of user in the system and the type of functions they perform in the system.
SAP User could be a broadly classified as just casual user displaying information, functional user who is making changes to configuration, developers who are creating custom object like programs or tables, and system administration user who are responsible for maintenance of the system. All the users are called named user as per SAP which basically means any user having a user id in the system. Within the named users they have professional named user, limited professional named user and employee user. The most expensive one is the professional user type and the least expensive one is employee user type. The License could range between $ 5000 - 1000
Six ways of Saving Licensing costs:
Monitoring your inactive users in the system:
Most of the companies have policy on inactivity of the users in the System. It could range from 60 days to 180 days depending on the industry and regulations which govern the industry. But most often the function of identifying users and locking them in the system is done manually and there is room for error or delay. Left unnoticed this could cost the customer licensing fee for the user who are not using the system
SAP Audit of user roll off process:
One of the common problems in most of the companies is the users are not removed or locked in the system as soon they leave the company. There is usually a time lag or sometimes totally ignored and the user who left the company long back is still active in the system. A process should designed so the users are locked or removed without any delay.
Mentoring usage times by the users:
Most of the clients have huge user base and they tend to not monitor who is really using the system. Monitoring the usage of the system by the users could provide valuable input in to the company. For example if the user has only used the system for 10 minutes in the whole year. Then the obvious further analysis will be what his user type. If the company can identify some of light users in the system, they can further investigate what kind of access they have and see if they are assigned to proper license types
Monitoring your developer licenses:
Developers are also users in the sap system. They are responsible for creating custom development objects in the system. This could be a program, functional module or a table. For creating the custom objects they will need a developer key from SAP. Any user who is developing custom objects has to be registered with SAP so they can develop custom objects. So companies should pay close attention to how many people are developers in the system, so if they see people who are not developing custom objects they converted to regular user.
Monitoring your system administrators:
Companies should keep close tabs on the number of system administrator type users in the system as they are the expensive ones among the licenses.
Assigning the users to License types and User types:
The entire user in the SAP system should be properly classified by their user types and license types. This will make sure when user are charge license fee properly.
Auditbot Audit SAP Risk management software suite, helps companies to spot and counter the risks instantaneously so that they do not become a headache to the internal audit resources and impact the budget. Without any SAP audit solution the deadly risk to the system will never be sensed and can be a huge bill to the company for audit cleanup. This might a also trigger other financial ramifications if the company is publicly traded entity.
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