SAP software asset management

I touched briefly a topic of licensing of SAP software in my older post here. I just can reiterate that it is a very very very complex topic. To understand it may make significant reduction of IT budgets spent yearly on licenses of SAP software. Needless to say that lack of such an insight may have also negative impact potentially from financial and legal liabilities. Analysis of SAP system usage falls under terms SAP SAM (Software Asset Management) and License Performance Evaluation (LPE).

Over the years, SAP came up with different type of licenses. Those can be e.g. named user license that refers to a direct SAP users as those who have logins and passwords on the SAP systems they work in. Then there is a package license that is tied to some metric like revenue or the number of employees in the company.

Even SAP users within the same SAP system can be recognized differently. So called Contractual User Types can be: named user, developer user, professional user, productivity user, functional user, etc. I encourage you to have a look into table TUTYPA (System measurement: User types with attributes). There are typically around 150 records each holding the user type of the SAP System.

Moreover, there is something called indirect usage, that includes also the use of data stored on SAP by or via a third application (e.g. by C.R.U.D. operations). In addition, the indirect usage needs the SAP license too.

 

How to perform SAP License Management? First step to understand any SAP landscape is to collect data about it.

In the times before Solution Manager (Solman) was introduced by SAP traditional SAP t-codes like STAD (Workload Statistics, Business Transaction Analysis), AL08 (Users Logged On system-wide) and SM04 (Active users on an SAP application server instance), and ST03 (Workload and Performance Statistics), etc were used to analyze input data for license usage. No need to mention that typical SAP shop has many different SAP system deployed. Each of them usually has several instances. It was not that easy to manage all these on all these systems.

After Solution Manager introduction an dedicated job can be run is used to collect the data. The job name is REFRESH_ADMIN_DATA_FROM_SUPPORT. As the Solman is typically connected to each SAP system deployed within an organization running the analysis it from one central spot simplified it a bit.

Finally, there are dedicated SAP tools to gather the usage data. T-codes:

SLAW - License Administration Workbench

USMM – SAP License Administration Workbench (SLIM)

SDCCN - Service Data Control Center

 

More information:

Licensing of SAP software

Solution Manager - License Management Prerequisites