Optimise SAP licensing in the SAP S/4HANA and RISE with SAP era

Awesome. Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. Thank you so much for joining us. So today's webinar, we're going to be talking all about optimizing your SAP licensing as you're looking to move to, you know, the rise with SAP next step. My name is Kat Haig, and I'm the head of marketing here at EPI-USE Labs for Australia and New Zealand. And we're excited to have Dudley Cartwright here, the CEO of Seterian, who is a very long term partner of EPI-USE Labs. It's gonna be a really insightful session today. I'm sure you're gonna have questions. If you do have questions, you'll be able to, ask them in the questions panel on the side of your screen. And once the presentation has concluded, Dudley will, will answer any questions that we have time for. If there are any outstanding questions after that, then we'll answer them via email. The session is being recorded, and we will be sharing the slides as well as this recording via email after the event. So feel free to, to take a look at that and to share that on as you see fit. So that's probably all I need to say. I'll probably give it another thirty seconds or so just to make sure we get everyone set up and joined. We have about fifty people that have registered for today's session, so it should be a good one. And yeah. So today's speaker, give a little bit more of an introduction. So Dudley Cartwright, he's the CEO at Centurion. He's been working with SAP customers across the globe to simplify governance, risk, and compliance processes. He is passionate about helping organizations reduce licensing costs, improve user experience, and ensure compliance without unnecessary complexity. This is a really hot topic. We've already talked about this, at a few recent events, and I know Dudley has been talking about this for a while and very often. So it should be a great webinar. With that, I will hand over to Dabbling. Perfect. Thanks, Cat. Thank you very much, and a big thank you to EPI-USE Labs who have arranged today's webinar. They've been We're a company that's been in existence for fifteen years and thirteen of those years we've been in partnership with EPI-USE Labs, so a very close and strategic partner of ours. Thank you. So welcome everyone. As Kat said, a very topical sort of, area at the moment. A lot of companies trying to get an gain an understanding as to what's happening in the licensing space. SAP has done some quite significant changes of how licenses are calculated as you move from ECC to RISE or which is also now called SAP Cloud ERP private. I think for the purpose of today's presentation, I'll still keep referring to it as RISE. It's just easier, rolls off the tongue a little bit easier. So a bit of background of who we are. We're a company that specialize in SAP security and risk and SAP licensing. As I mentioned, we've been around for fifteen years. We've got companies of a hundred and fifty customers that use our products in various parts of the world. I think we've got great exposure to, you know, lots of different regions, lots of different regulations. So we do feel that we do get exposure to many different types of requirements, many different levels of audit strictness, etcetera. And but the big the purpose of today's session is very much on on licensing. So I'm not gonna be talking about anything in our sort of access risk functionality. It's more around the licensing capabilities that I'm gonna be focusing today's session on. So if we take a step back and we just say, okay. Well, what is happening in the world of SAP? I think there's two sort of key areas that I'd just like to focus on. The first is SAP has got a very clear objective of trying to move all the customers of SAP ECC onto s four. And this is a relatively easy objective for SAP to achieve in that they just make sort of in this maintenance or support. You know? And as we know that's what they've done in twenty thirty or maybe twenty thirty three for some customers, they're just not gonna be supporting ECC anymore. So companies are almost forced to either move to s four and or you go and look for a complete new ERP solution, which is unlikely for many organizations. Very closely aligned to this objective is SAP would also like to move all of their customers to, the cloud solutions or the cloud prop, offering, and that is the SAP Cloud ERP or the SAP Cloud ERP private. Okay. So the one is, what was called the old grow, and the other one, SAP Cloud ERP private, as I mentioned, is the, is what was referred to as RISE. Okay. So SAP's got a very clear objective that they do wanna move customers away from on premise, and they wanna move them to the SAP Cloud ERP offering, okay, whether that's Grow or whether that's RISE. Now this is a slightly more difficult objective for SAP to achieve. They've got to somehow convince customers that this new offering is a much better offering and that makes business sense, etcetera. So what SAP did for the first, for the early adopters, SAP needed to be very aggressive with offering lots of discounts and making it financially attractive to move to the Rise offering. And but what we see now is that as more and more companies start sort of moving to RISE, SAP doesn't need to be as aggressive with offering discounts anymore, and they sort of shift the strategy more to disincentivizing customers to stay on premise with either not offering any of the discounts to any of the on premise customers and or just not making certain features or functionality available to the on premise customers. And this talk of a lot of the AI type capabilities only being made available to, the RISE type customers. So that's where SAP, those are the two clearer objectives. And so for us, what we're saying is that for many organizations, one of the biggest decisions that your CIO or your IT director is going to need to make pertaining to SAP over the next five years is to answer this question. Do we stay on premise, or do we move to SAP Cloud ERP private? Rise. Okay. And so if that's gonna be one of the most important decisions that your organization needs to make, we feel that and along with EPI's Labs can assist with that decision making process. Okay? We're not here to tell you to stay on premise or to move to Rise, but what we wanna do is we wanna be able to provide you with certain data points that SAP is not gonna provide you with in order to help you understand what is gonna be the true cost of you moving to Rise and does it make business sense. So a big part of what I'm gonna be demoing to you later is how do we provide you with a very vital sort of data point for you to understand what is the true number of full use equivalent licenses that you will need if you move to RISE, and does it make business sense for you to move to RISE, you know, with having to sort of subscribe to that number of if you ease. Okay. So I think we've got a poll now, and Cat is just gonna let the poll run at the moment now. And we're just quite interested to see, you know, where are people that are currently, you know, listening to this webinar, you know, in your journeys. Are you currently on ECC and you're still considering, you know, you're considering a move to s four, but it'll be on premise? Or you're on ECC and you're considering a move to Rise? Or are you already on s four on premise, but you may be considering Rise, or you're already on Rise. So those are the four possible scenarios that are available. And, you know, we'll just give that a few seconds, and then we'll see if we can display that poll. So, Cat, if that is available. If we can't display it on the screen, what we will do is we will just share that information with you a bit later. You should be able to see those results, you think, Natalie. Is that do you see that? I can read them out otherwise. Yeah. So, unfortunately, I can't on my screen. So if you can just mail your reader document. So we had so planning move from ECC to s four HANA on premise, we had twenty percent. Planning move from ECC to SAP Cloud ERP private, we had forty percent. We had none for running SAP HANA on prem considering Cloud ERP private, and we had forty percent for already on SAP cloud ERP private. Okay. Perfect. Okay. Well, those stats actually lend themselves very well to this presentation. Okay. So what we're gonna be talking about today is very much talking to those two sets of people who they're on ECC. They're considering RISE, or they're already on RISE, and they need to ensure that they manage their licenses, going forward. Okay. So this what I'm about to speak to now is very much talking to the majority of the those people. Okay. So maybe just to take a step back, and we'll just talk a little bit about what's changed from a licensing perspective. So in the ECC world, life user licenses, we would define there were very rough definitions. If you looked at your contract, SAP would specify and say, listen. A limited professional user is a named user who can perform some admin front functionality and also perform work orders. So there was very loose definition of what constituted or the definition of a various license category. So it was left very much open to interpretation. There was an element of self disclosure. You know, different organizations interpreted those rules differently. And so there was a lot of sort of vagueness and grayness to how licensing worked. It was always very difficult to assist an organization optimize their licenses because it was, to some degree, how you interpreted the definition from a legal perspective. Okay? And then also the big you see SAP do their sort of licensing assessment on an annual basis. So as we move into the RISE world, SAP has published or released introduced the star measurement program. So what that is, I'm gonna be explaining that in a bit more detail in the slide to follow. But, effectively, SAP has defined a star rule set, which contains a list of authorization object fuel values, and SAP will run an analysis to see which users in your SAP system have access to any of those values. Okay. So I will go into a bit more detail explaining that in a second, but it's been a wonderful move by SAP because it's a definitive approach. SAP has clearly specified how they measure. You can go and download the star rule set, and you know exactly how SAP is gonna interpret certain access that's been assigned to the users. A big change is coming from the fact that SAP will run this measurement or the measurement on a monthly basis. Okay? So that's a huge shift from previously in the ECC world where when you companies were only assessed on an annual basis. What that meant in the ECC world is you could sort of not care too much about the licensing impact for eleven months of the year, and maybe the month before you knew that sort of licensing assessment was gonna take place, you just quickly go and do some optimization and some cleanup. Okay? So you just did a bit of housekeeping just before. As we move into the RISE world with this measurement happening on a monthly basis, it does require or it will mean that organizations will need to ensure that their role design and the access that's assigned to the users is relevant and appropriate for those users almost on a continuous basis throughout the year. The minute you go over your contracted number of full use equivalent licenses, in theory, that then means that you'll need to buy new licenses. There's gonna be a true up cost and that new that is likely to set your new minimum for the remainder of your subscription period. Okay. So there's just gonna be a lot more emphasis on the s m on the authorization team to ensure that the role is that the access and roles are appropriate for the users on a continuous basis. Okay. So maybe then just to go and talk about how that star measurement program works. So what SAP has done is they've defined what is referred to as a star rule set. That star rule set contains a list of authorization object field values. Okay. So this is a subset of the rule set, and there's certain authorization object fields. So as a as an example, if you have a look at that second authorization object, excuse me, it's called c m underscore con. And with the value activity sixty, that means that any user that has that value, they will be classified as an advanced type FUE. So and keep in mind that the way the style measurement program works, it's based on what access has been assigned to the user, not what the user is using, but what has been assigned to the user. So what SAP does then is it goes and then analyzes all the access that's been assigned to the users in your SAP system, and it just determines whether any of the authorizations in any of the roles are in the star rule set. And if any of those values on the rule set, then those users those roles and users then will be sort of classified accordingly. So as an example, if we've got a user that's been assigned a purchase order maintenance role, they've also been assigned a vendor maintenance role, they've got a finance display role, and they've also got the a role that allows them to post journals. In the purchase order maintenance role, there's an authorization object field value that has been classified as an advanced FUE in the star rule set. So what SAP will then do is it'll say, whatever is the highest value or category that has been assigned to a user, that user will be classified then as that highest category. So the as in this case, the highest category within the sort of FUE process outside the developer licenses, you've got an advanced FUE type license, you've got a core FUE license, and you've got a self-service. And there's significant cost differences between those three. And so whichever is the highest value, that user then gets sort of classified accordingly. Okay. So just as I mentioned the earlier, so what SAP has done in this space is really is a wonderful move. Okay? Because they've sort of got rid of the vagueness, the grayness to how licensing works, and it's a definitive approach now. Now by SAP sort of publishing what the star rule set is and how they measure their users, what that allows us to do from a sort of vendor perspective is we can then start assisting organizations optimize their licenses. We can ensure that you don't pay for licenses that you do not need because we know how licenses are being met being measured. We can either optimize the role design to ensure that we don't overpay or pay for unnecessary FUEs, or we can also start considering some process changes to also see if there's any FUE optimization by introducing some process changes. Okay. So some of the challenges that we're seeing some organizations face as they consider the move rise. Okay. So the first challenge is that a lot of companies sometimes find it difficult to justify the business case of moving to RISE. They look at what they're currently paying in for annual maintenance in ECC, and then they get a sort of have an assessment done by SAP and with the idea of moving to RISE, and they have a look at what that RISE cost will be. And it's sometimes significantly more than they're currently paying in ECC. And they just say, well, it makes no business sense for us to move to RISE if we're gonna be paying twice as much in licenses than we currently pay paying now. And the reason why the RISE of license or subscription sometimes costs an organization a lot more, it's because the it when SAP does the star measurement, it is done on the client's current SAP role design. And the client's current SAP role design has not been designed with licensing in mind. So it significantly overstates the number of FUEs that the organization needs. So for a lot of companies, they might be very interested in moving to RISE, but the number of FEEs that SAP is telling them they need is significantly inflated based on the current role design, which is just not being designed with licensing in mind. And another challenge that we're organizations face is they go into these subscription contracts with paying for a lot more FEEs than they actually require. You know, SAP comes and does this assessment and says, listen, mister Client, you know, you need five hundred FEEs. But the reality is they need five hundred FEEs because that's what the current role design is saying they need. But, actually, based on the way the users are using the SAP system, they only need a hundred FEEs. So you often end up paying for many more FEEs than you need because the way in which SAP determines how many FEEs you need is almost I don't wanna say not fair, but it's based on your current role design, which and your current role design has not been designed with licensing in mind. And then just lastly, there is also the risk. Once you embark on a RISE subscription contract, you would subscribe to a certain number of FUEs. So as an example, let's say you're a company and you're subscribing to two hundred and fifty FUEs, and your subscription contract is either over three years, five years, or seven years. So let's say you've signed up for a three year subscription contract for two hundred and fifty FUEs, and during the first year of that subscript subscription contract, your authorization sort of go, you know, sort of arrive. People get assigned much wider access or one role gets put through into that gets assigned to two hundred people that make moves a lot of people up from sort of a lower category of self-service up to advance. And your FEEs jump up to three hundred and fifty. So in theory, what's gonna happen there is SAP is gonna say, listen. You over your contracted number, you need to buy another hundred FEEs to make you get up to three hundred and fifty, and that becomes your new baseline for the remainder of this of the contract. Okay? So it becomes very important that you manage your authorizations continuously and ensure that there's no sort of authorization creep that could result in some mid subscription true up cost. So what we're offering between Serturn and EPI-USE Labs as part of this engagement is saying, we can assist you with a licensing assessment to help you sort of identify that key data point of saying how many FUEs does your organization need based on how your users are actually using the system. So Serturn makes use of some very detailed authorization object traces, and so we can then determine with once these traces are activated, we then know exactly what activities a user has used down to the authorization object field level. So we'll know, listen. Joe Bloggs has used the authorization object if b k f book. He's only used activity o one, and he used it for company code two thousand. And that's the detailed granular level that if we know what people are using down to that authorization object field value level, we can highlight and tell you what is your absolute best case scenario, number of FUEs that your organization needs based on how your users are using the system. And you can take that and use that information to help you with your contract negotiations with s SAP. And so the benefits of these this assessment will be that we first of all, you can sort of gain an understanding as to what the rise should be costing you, not based on what your role design is saying, but based on how your users are actually using the SAP system. And that is often significantly less than what the SAP or the what your role design is indicating the number of FEEs you need. The our assessment will also then indicate or highlight which roles and which users can be sort of remediated or cleaned up or how can you go about optimizing your FEEs by just sort of removing unused access or removing unused sort of authorization object field values. And then lastly, we also wanna just provide you with these data points that SAP is not gonna provide you with, and we hope then that we'll be able to help you be better prepared for any rise contract negotiations you may have with SAP. Okay. So just to touch on this next part here before I get to the product demo. So I think it's important for organizations to also realize that the way in which they've been using an access control or a GRC solution will also need to change. As you move to RISE, you cannot only be thinking of access from a perspective of how many segregation of duty risks do my users have. You also need to be thinking about access from a licensing perspective. Excuse me. And so what we're saying is a lot of organizations will implement an access control solution, and they do that because they want to implement effective controls. Okay. So they wanna limit the amount of financial loss that they incur as an organization. Okay. So an access control solution predominantly performs access risk management activities. Access control solution can also do the provisioning of roles to users and can also assist an organization with SAP licensing. And so when we when you look at the access risk management activities, the access control solution is there primarily to assist with fraud prevention. It highlights which users have got segregation of duty risks and for the organization to say, okay. Well, listen. Let's go and address that. I'm not happy that Joe Blogs can create an invoice and also can create the purchase order type of activity. So that sort of functionality of the access control solution is to try and assist the organization, reduce the chances of fraud happening within the organization, and minimize financial loss through fraud happening in the organization. Likewise, with the provisioning of access to users, the access control solution can perform these what if simulations before you actually go and do that role assignment in production. And so that simulation or that what if will say, listen. If you assign this role to this user, it will introduce a new segregation of duty violation. And then that allows the business the opportunity to either reject that assignment or approve that assignment. But, again, the intention of that is to say, how do we minimize, you know, users getting unnecessary segregation of duty access assigned to them, which could result in fraud and the financial loss associated with that? And then because user licenses have always been linked to access, an access control solution can also then just assist with license compliance. So in the ECC world, the majority of organizations would implement an access control solution primarily to assist with access risk management activities. Companies felt that they were at greater financial risk from fraud happening within the organization than SAP license noncompliance. But now what's happening is as we move into the s four world and SAP has changed the way in which they measure user licenses and is now very, very closely linked or associated to what authorization objects are assigned to the users. So there's an incredibly close correlation between the access and what how many user license if you ease or licenses you consume. The reality is that for many organizations, they are at greater financial risk from licensed noncompliance or e that either being they subscribing to many, many more FEEs than they actually need and or during a subscription period, the number of the authorization, the role design goes awry and they need to sort of do an FUE trip cost and they need to pay buy more licenses. But the reality is for many organizations, they are greater financial risk from license noncompliance than they are from fraud actually taking place in the organization. So we're not here to say, don't focus on your access risk management activities. We're not saying that at all. But we're saying that these two activities are so closely inter twined as we move into the RISE world that you need to manage your access and consider that from a segregation of duty perspective as well as a licensing perspective if you are going to want to ensure that you're implementing effective financial controls in your organization. Okay. So I am gonna now jump to the product demo, and I'm gonna just spend the next sort of ten or fifteen minutes just talking through how the product works. And please keep in mind that everything that I show you here today is available as part of an assessment should you choose to take us up on a licensing assessment. It's a free offering that we offer that you can just see how the product works with your own data, and you can also see whether we identify any optimization opportunities off the back of that. As I mentioned, we've got a lot of access control functionality, but that's not the focus of today's session. To the focus of today's session is just around the licensing module. Okay. So what we do with the our licensing module is we effectively highlight three data points. So if we look at the bars in this bottom section here, the first bar represents the number of full use equivalent licenses that your organization will need based on your current role design. So that is this FUE consumption number. This organization, based on the current role design, needs is going to need is consuming one thousand two hundred FUEs. As we can see, this client is only entitled to they're only contracted to six hundred and fifty. So they're currently consuming significantly more FUEs than they're licensed for. So this organization actually runs the risk of SAP coming and saying, mister Client, use six hundred odd FUE short. You need to buy more licenses. Okay. So then just getting to the this bottom of the bar chart again at the bottom, the three bars. So the second bar represents what is the cleanup opportunity available to you your organization based on your current role design. Okay. So this is the number of FEEs your current role design. The top bar is the number of FEEs your current role design is consuming. The second bar represents what is the cleanup opportunity available based on your current role design, And that is identifying unused access, whether that's removing unused roles, or whether that's identifying authorization object field values that are not being used. And you can sort of see how clean how much how many FEs can you reduce your account by just addressing your current role design. The third data point, and this is, again, another data point that SAP doesn't provide you with, is FUE potential. Okay. So that FUE potential is account of one hundred and sixty four. And what that is telling us is that is the best case scenario number of FUEs that your organization needs based on how they are currently using the SAP system. Okay. So that is to assume if you were to align your role design exactly how users are using the system that you would be able to get down to that number of FUEs. So that is the valuable data point that we also feel is quite important for those organizations that are still on ECC and they are considering RISE. We can do that assessment on your current ECC system to say, how are your users currently using ECC? And based on that, we would you can you would consume x number of FUEs. So if you're into your contract negotiations with SAP, SAP is gonna come with a number, and you're gonna have another number in at the back of your mind that you know is the absolute best case scenario number. You can then negotiate with SAP to get, hopefully, anywhere in between the in between that number. So and then I'm just gonna show you then how some of the sort of cleanup functionality will work if we were to do this assessment on your system and you did need to go and optimize some licenses. Okay? So first of all, we illustrate where does the cleanup come from. There's two types of cleanup we can do. The one cleanup is cleaning up at the user level, and the second cleanup is cleaning up at the role level. Okay. So what do mean by cleaning up at the user level? That is possibly just some dormant users that haven't been flagged haven't been sort of expired or locked. And or we've got users that have got roles that have been assigned to them, and none of those roles are being used, but those roles are making that user a higher license category. Okay? So we can see that there's limited cleanup opportunity at the user level. More of the cleanup often comes at the role level, and that's where we look at the underlying authorization objects of the role and say, well, based on all the users that have got this role, what are they using? Are there any values that we can remove because none of the users are using those values? And that is often where the significant part of the optimization may come from. Okay. So just to go and look at some of the users as an example, what this is doing is it will list all the users. It will show just list this. We'll see these are all the users that have been classified as advanced users, and we can maybe see these a couple of users based on what they're using. This user here, Andrew Coldwell, he's currently an advanced FUE based on the roles assigned to him. But based on what the user has been using, we can maybe downgrade this user to a self-service user because of what they're using. So I'm just gonna go into this user. This user's been assigned, you know, a huge number of roles, and we can see the one role that is making this user an advanced user has not been used. It's superfluous. The user's got it, but the user hasn't used any of the authorizations from this role. So we, in theory, could take this role away from this user without impacting this person's job function, and this person would be downgraded from an advanced user down to a self-service type user. Now to get into how we show do this at the role level, again, this is where the majority of the cleanup will come from. So we list all the roles that we've got, and I've just filtered this in descending order or sorted this in descending order. All of these roles here are my sort of advanced use roles. They've got an authorization object field value in them that make it an advanced type role. If we have a look here at this HR posting role here, this particular role is currently an advanced use role. It's got team users assigned to it, but we can potentially downgrade this to a self-service type users. I'm just gonna drill into this role that we can see what are the authorization object field values in this role that's in the star rule set that SAP is using to measure us against, and we can see that there's an authorization object called f underscore b k f book underscore biz, sorry, with the activity field zero six. That is what's making this user or this role an advanced use role. But what we can see of the ten users that have got this role, none of the ten users have executed this activity. So what we can do is possibly remove this activity field of value from this role. This role will automatically then downgrade to a core u use role, and all of a sudden, you've potentially saved yourself ten FUEs, assuming these users were only getting this role that was making them the advanced use role. So by showing this usage down at the authorization object field value level for all the users that have been assigned to the roles, you can then start doing some role changes and role tweaks at the authorization object field value, and you can just save yourself a significant amount of FEEs by just refining your roles, by knowing who's using what at the auth object field value level, and then adjusting your roles accordingly. Excuse me. So for the as an example, we can see that we've got an authorization object here that has been used. The three of the ten users have used it. We can go and click on the information button there that will go and show us the trace data for this for these three users, exactly what have they used, what values, etcetera. So that's if you wanted to see who were the users that were using certain values, and you would then know if you were to do a raw split, you would know which users needed the, you know, certain those values to be assigned back to them a different way. Okay. And then just lastly, what we've also go gone and done then is for those organizations that are used that will make use of, you know, to turn in a business as usual process. So let's say you've gone and embarked on a cleanup and you've done some optimization. How do you and your on your in your eyes subscription contract, how do you ensure that you manage your licenses on a day to day basis? Okay. So what has got is we've got this what if simulation capabilities at almost every sort of scenario of SAP access change request can be simulated. I'm gonna just choose a simple basic example of assigning a particular user to a role. So let's say in our organization, we've got someone's just logged a call. We they want to be able to execute transaction code, issue, o one. Your security administrator finds the appropriate role that gives that user that access, and your very quickly. And this is the user that's requested that. In this what if simulation, will now go and do an analysis or this assessment against say, listen. If we were to assign this role to this user, it would not only introduce six segregation of duty violations, but we also show what the licensing impact of this change will be. So this second bar here is saying, listen. This user is going to by doing this change, we are increasing our FUEs by account of one. And what we mean by that is this user was a self-service user. By signing in this access, the user's gonna move up to an advanced type u type user. So what this does allow is that you can then start managing your FUEs on a sort of on every single change request. You can see what the FUE or license impact is of every single change. And so just think of this as if you were assigning this role to fifty users. This could increase one role change or one role assignment can increase your FUEs, you know, by as much as fifty in one change request. And so you can then just build into the workflow process that, listen, we have got a license manager, and they will also need to approve any of these changes because we don't want our sort of FEEs jumping up significantly over and above what we contracted to. Okay. And then lastly, the last area that I just wanted to touch on getting back to our licensing is we've also got this projection sort of functionality where we can help an organization who's currently on ECC and considering the move to RISE, we can help project certain scenarios. And those projections are the three scenarios that I spoke about earlier and saying, okay. Well, listen, mister Client, if you do nothing with your current SAP role design, you're gonna consume one thousand two hundred and two FUEs, and we can go and specify, well, what's the cost of the FUE that you can see the monetary value of your decision to stick with your current role design. The second scenario is the FUE cleanup. We say, listen, mister Client, if we go and embark on a cleanup, we can reduce your FUEs from this one thousand two hundred down to seven hundred and ninety two FUEs, but there might be a project cost that we need to factor in. There also might be a Citroen license cost that we need to factor in. So we can build all of that in so we can see, well, what is the actual cost difference between the current design and the cleanup, including all other costs associated with that type of project. And then the third scenario, this may be a complete role redesign, but we say, mister Client, listen. If you're gonna redo your roles completely and you build your roles up with licensing by design, you can get down to a hundred and sixty four FUEs. But that's a much bigger project cost. You're possibly getting FUE Labs to help you with that project. They're gonna charge you. It's a much bigger project. They're gonna put their figure in there. There's also this, you know, license cost, software license cost, etcetera. But it just allows you to visualize that we can hopefully use this to show the CFO or the IT director and say, listen. These are the different scenarios. If we spend a bit of money now, we can get down to x number of FEEs, and that will mean this that will mean we pay x amount. And what's important, these current figures are based on one year, but a subscript a Ryze subscription is never one year. It's either three years, five years, or seven years. So you can go and simulate what those costs will actually be over a three year or a five year period depending on which period your subscription is gonna be. And you can then use that to hopefully justify whether it makes sense to embark on some form of cleanup project. And in some cases, it may even make sense to embark on a complete role redesign because the upfront project cost effort will bring you down to such a low number of FEEs that it just makes such financial sense for you to go through that effort because you're then not gonna pay you know, you're not gonna overpay on FEEs for your subscription period. Okay. So that is all I wanted to cover. So I know we've only got three minutes left, Kat. So I'm gonna sort of hand over back to you. I will stop sharing. If there are any questions, we can answer those now. But, yeah, obviously, for everyone, thank you very much for your time. I hope that I shared something with you today that you weren't aware of. And as I said, if you are interest interested in our licensing assessment, please reach out to Cat, and we can just start that conversation as to what's involved with that. But I think it's quite a valuable exercise. We're busy with fifty of those activities at the moment, so it's been it's proved to be incredibly valuable. What we are saying, how we can assist the organization optimize, and also for those clients that are still in ECC, just helping them understand how many APEs they need based on on the usage. So it's incredibly valuable thing, and we're not charging for that activity as at the moment. Okay. Kat, all yours? Awesome. Yes. There were a couple of questions that I can see. So the first one here is SAP does not want to sell our company the s four HANA license to host the instance on premise. They are imposing that companies move to cloud by not making the license available. Can you comment on this topic? I thought that you've got a choice as the organization to it's it's you're not forced to go to Rise, but I think they're just trying to make it unfavorable to go on premise. You can still go on premise, but it's just there's no discounts being offered for the on premise clients anymore. But you have the option, but I just think SAP is gonna is making it very difficult. Financially, they're making it difficult to you know, they've got they wanna move everyone to cloud. Awesome. So, hopefully, that answers that question, Michelle. If not, just pop another question in the chat, and we can keep chatting. As Dudley mentioned as well, when I send through the recording, my those emails that you get from me, you can reply to any of those emails if you have any follow-up questions and or would like to speak to it myself or Dudley. A couple other questions here as well. Do SAP focus on authorizations allocated or usage of the assigned functionality itself? The concern within our organization is remediating FUE authorization objects could see vital functionality drop off or be impaired. Can your tools allow to produce targeted testing? Yeah. So I think so the way SAP does the measurement is based on what authorization objects are assigned to users. I think the big difference between some of SAP's tooling to help with optimization, SAP's tooling is done based on the transaction code usage where we look at the underlying auth object usage. And if you base it on the transaction code usage, unfortunately, that can be misleading because you don't know what activity values that user's using for that particular transaction code. So with our analysis, because we make use of the ST user trace, which looks records down to the old object fuel value level, when we recommend a role change, we can tell you that change can happen and is unlikely gonna cause any business disruption because for the period that we've got history of the auth change, no users or that user didn't use that value. It's not saying you might not need it in the future, but you can at least create a role for that in case someone needs it going forward. But we've seen very little business disruption with our sort of optimization activity because of the trace data that Serturn makes use of in relation to what other companies are, and SAP also is making use of at at a higher level, which can cause some issues. Awesome. Okay. Well, I've got two last questions here so far that have come through. So one here is, is the FUE style model applicable to on prem or only Rise? Okay. So SAP has told us that there's two star rule sets at the moment, one for on premise and one for Rise. They those rule sets at the moment are identical. However, SAP did tell us that for the it's for on premise clients, they can use the star rule set as a guide, but it's not how they're getting measured. Okay. So, that is what one, of the SAP people in one of the regions told us. Whether that's accurate, we don't know. We had a call earlier today where a client said they're on s four on premise, and they feel they're getting measured against the star rule set. So it's a little bit unclear at the moment, but we were led to believe that the star measurement process would only apply to RISE. But as of this morning, I now have my doubts. And the last one here is that what about bespoke authorization object in roles? Okay. So yeah. Because those any custom sort of transaction codes or Fiori apps or authorization objects is not in the star rule set, those will effectively be unmeasurable by SAP. So whatever custom functionality you develop, SAP can't measure that. It's not in their star rule set. So that will not sort of consume any, if you e, lite license, any of the custom functionality. Awesome. And sorry. There is one more. If the company has not started the migration or conversion to s four HANA server, how can you assess the reconfig of a process and determine how many FUAs you will need for that process? So what we do there is we do that in ECC. And, yes, some of the activities will change when you move to s four. Some of the transaction codes are gonna fall away, but the reality, what we're seeing at the moment so say you're creating vendors with x k o one, that will be replaced with BP, you know, or the equivalent app in s four. The reality is those sort of transactions still call on the same authorization object field values. So we what we're doing is we're measuring or seeing how the client is currently using ECC, and we're saying based on your how your users are currently using ECC, you need x number of FEEs. You may want to build in some fats into that and say, listen, but our processes are gonna change slightly, etcetera. But when you look from an authorization perspective down to the auth object level, even though the way in which you create or you perform certain functions will change from e c to s four, it's still calling on the same or very similar authorization object field values, which is how SAP is doing the measurement. So all the assessment in ECC will not be a hundred percent accurate, but I'm pretty sure even if it's ninety percent accurate based on the process changes that will happen, that number is gonna be so vastly different to what SAP is telling you need that, you know, you will be there's still a significant saving by just looking doing that analysis in ECC and just trying to get an idea of the number of a if you ease. As an example, if we did that assessment on an ECC, and let's say we analyze and said, listen. You need two hundred FEEs the way you're using the SAP and the ECC world. You might then say, okay. Well, let's just have a building a bit of protection. Let's go in with two hundred and fifty FTEs as an example to factor in some process changes, etcetera. The reality is if SAP did that assessment on your system, they will be giving you a figure closer to six hundred or seven hundred. You know? So even if we build in some fat into the ECC process, it's gonna be significantly less to what more than might be SAP's figure that they're gonna give you. K. Definitely worth doing. And there's another one here. So what guarantee do we have with SAP that they will continue to support the s four rise and for how long? We were one of the early adopters and transitioned to private, and recently, the subscription renewal price doubled and subsequently have been pushed to public. Yeah. There's a few I don't think I'm best placed to answer that, but there's a few things that we've seen that could be a bit of a concern. You know, the one is that, you know, a lot of companies have embarked on the RISE subscription based on an assessment or a version of the star rule set. And that star rule set has changed during the subscription period. And those companies, if it is, has jumped up. And we see, well, you know, that's incredibly unfair on the client. They decided to go to onto this contract based on a certain figure, certain rule set. They made a decision based on certain facts at the time. The fact that SAP changed the rule set mid subscription period, and that means the client now is paying more if he is. We thought, surely that legally, that's not allowed. That's not fair. So, yes, there are some areas. I must say, though, the current star rule set is incredibly lenient. It's incredibly lenient. There's a lot there that even proper posting transactions, f b o one, activity o one is a self-service. So SAP has been very lenient at the moment. But the fact that maybe the goalposts can be moved, unfortunately, yes. I I do think companies will need to start considering how do they build in clauses into the agreement to make sure that, listen, nothing can change. They're making this decision based on this. If SAP if you change your mind halfway through, that's not impacting us. The you know, that can be for your net new client. But, yeah, I can imagine there is some concerns with the goalpost just being moved a bit. Awesome. Yeah. Those are some, some great questions there. I think at this stage, that is it with questions. So if anyone has any last minute questions, check them up now. But if not, yeah, thank you so much, sadly, for your time. That was an invaluable session. As we've seen with previous sessions, it is such a hot topic at the moment, and we do get a lot of engagement on this one. So, yes, we'll be sending through the slides and the presentation probably early next week, Monday, Tuesday. And, yeah, you'll be able to access this recording if needed, all those these slide decks. I know that there was a table in there in those slides that I thought was quite interesting, but was a bit small. So if you needed to kinda zoom in and didn't get a chance, that'll be in I think that'll be in the slide deck that you'll get as well. Awesome. Well, I'll leave it there. No more questions have come through. So thank you again, everyone, for attending, and enjoy the rest of your morning or afternoon depending on where you are. Thanks again. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Query. Thanks.