Over the past two and a half years I have had the priv­i­lege of serv­ing on the ASUG Board of Direc­tors. As a mem­ber of the ASUG team, I’ve had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work with SAP and oth­er glob­al user groups address­ing the SAP indi­rect access issue. The SAP dig­i­tal access license mod­el and the recent­ly announced Dig­i­tal Access Adop­tion Pro­gram were the result of col­lab­o­ra­tive efforts between SAP and ASUG. 

My involve­ment in this work, in com­bi­na­tion with my expe­ri­ence as Johnsonville’s CIO for more than 20 years, pro­vides me the oppor­tu­ni­ty to  share our review of indi­rect access as a busi­ness case for oth­er com­pa­nies to learn from as we eval­u­ate and poten­tial­ly adopt the dig­i­tal access model.

In a series of blogs start­ing with this one, I will doc­u­ment our jour­ney as we ana­lyze indi­rect access, the impact of dig­i­tal access licens­ing, and the pros and cons of adopt­ing the new licens­ing mod­el. By the time I get through the third or fourth blog, it’s pos­si­ble that we may decide that dig­i­tal access is not in Johnsonville’s best inter­est. At this point, how­ev­er, I sim­ply don’t have the answers I need to make an informed deci­sion either way.

I will use this first install­ment of the series to pro­vide some back­ground and lay out our high-lev­el approach to the process. So, hang in there — this should be an inter­est­ing ride.

John­sonville: The Foundation 

John­sonville has been an SAP cus­tomer since Decem­ber of 2003. In 2004, we went live with SAP HCM (Pay­roll and Ben­e­fits) and fol­lowed that with an imple­men­ta­tion of SCM-APO (DP, SNP, and a VMI Solu­tion) in 2005. We start­ed our core ECC imple­men­ta­tion in mid-2006 and went live with a big bang deploy­ment on Jan­u­ary 2008. Today, we have a sin­gle glob­al instance sup­port­ing more than 2,000 users on a 24×7 basis in the U.S., Cana­da, Mex­i­co, Sin­ga­pore, Japan, and (very soon) the Philippines. 

Over the past decade we have extend­ed our SAP land­scape with SAP Busi­ness Ware­house on HANA, SAP Busi­ness Objects, SAP Prod­uct Life­cy­cle Man­age­ment (PLM), SAP Plant Main­te­nance (PM), SAP Pro­duc­tion Plan­ning and Detailed Sched­ul­ing (PP/DS), FAS, SAP Glob­al Batch Trace­abil­i­ty (GBT), SAP Glob­al Trade Ser­vices (GTS), Trade Pro­mo­tion Man­age­ment (TPM), SAP Cloud for Cus­tomer (C4C), SAP Busi­ness Plan­ning and Con­sol­i­da­tion (BPC), SAP MII, SAP PI, Open­Text, Viziya, SAP Con­cur, SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, Ben­e­fit­fo­cus, and a num­ber of oth­er small solutions.

An SAP-First Shop

In 2017 we suc­cess­ful­ly migrat­ed our SAP ECC 6.0 land­scape to SAP S/4HANA 1610. We are a ​“SAP first,” but not a ​“SAP only” envi­ron­ment. We also have a large num­ber of third-par­ty solu­tions and ser­vices that we have inte­grat­ed into SAP using EDI, ABAP, and SAP inte­gra­tion tech­nolo­gies. EDI is heav­i­ly used to inte­grate our 3PL part­ners, transportation/​logistics part­ners, cus­tomers, ven­dors, and oth­er ser­vice providers.

Over­all, John­sonville is still a rel­a­tive­ly ​“young” (15 years) and ​“sim­ple” (sin­gle on-prem glob­al instance) SAP imple­men­ta­tion. With that being said, we have well over 30 SAP license relat­ed appen­dices that have added, mod­i­fied, and removed licens­ing enti­tle­ments over the past 15 years. For­tu­nate­ly, I was engaged with nego­ti­a­tion of the very first order form and am still at John­sonville today, so I can pro­vide a knowl­edge base for under­stand­ing our exist­ing con­tracts and his­tor­i­cal negotiations.

Thoughts and Theories 

Let’s be clear about my pri­ma­ry assump­tions under­ly­ing our analysis:

Assump­tion 1:  We have some lev­el of unli­censed indi­rect access with­in our envi­ron­ment. I don’t know to what extent (I have some assump­tions, but no proof). Nor do I nec­es­sar­i­ly believe I have a com­pre­hen­sive under­stand­ing of where all the indi­rect access is occurring. 

Assump­tion 2:  There will be dis­agree­ment between SAP and John­sonville on enti­tle­ments grant­ed under some of our licens­es. One good exam­ple is the Sales and Ser­vice Order Pro­cess­ing (SSOP) engine. There is no doc­u­men­ta­tion I have in my pos­ses­sion that clear­ly delin­eates what trans­ac­tions or use cas­es are cov­ered by SSOP pur­chased in 2003. When John­sonville pur­chased that license, it was pur­chased to cov­er the EDI trans­ac­tions used to ful­fill cus­tomer orders. That ful­fill­ment requires a ton of EDI inven­to­ry trans­ac­tions (mate­r­i­al doc­u­ments) to move and man­age inven­to­ry with­in the 3PL com­pa­nies that are ful­fill­ing our cus­tomer orders.

Assump­tion 3:  Both SAP and John­sonville will work toward a win/​win res­o­lu­tion. As a cus­tomer there is a leap of faith to proac­tive­ly engage an audit and sales orga­ni­za­tion and ​“bare your dirty laun­dry.” We will take that leap expect­ing SAP to show true cus­tomer empa­thy in res­o­lu­tion of any licens­ing com­pli­ance issues we uncov­er. I have the advan­tage of hav­ing worked direct­ly with many of the folks in Wall­dorf over the past few years, so I believe that faith is well placed.

Assump­tion 4:  Both John­sonville and SAP are going to learn some things along this jour­ney. Hope­ful­ly our shared learn­ings will ease the pain for those fol­low­ing the same path in the near future.

Next Steps

Our next step will be to accom­plish two things: First, we will attempt to iden­ti­fy all the inter­faces and sources of indi­rect access with­in our exist­ing ECC HCM and SAP S/4HANA land­scape. Next, we will apply the SAP Esti­ma­tion Tool Notes to both our HCM ECC and SAP S/4HANA envi­ron­ments to under­stand cur­rent doc­u­ment con­sump­tion. The esti­ma­tion tool relies on Tech­ni­cal User IDs that are used in inter­faces to count doc­u­ments. As such, com­plet­ing the first step is crit­i­cal to get­ting accu­rate counts in the sec­ond step.

The next blog posts in the series may change giv­en they will be as close to real-time as pos­si­ble. They may include:

• Get­ting Start­ed, Run­ning the Esti­ma­tor Tool, and Ini­tial Results
• I Have the Num­bers, Now What? Engag­ing SAP
• Fine-Tun­ing the Numbers
• Under­stand­ing and Nego­ti­at­ing Con­ver­sion Costs
• Final Deci­sion, Lessons Learned, and Wrap Up

For the pur­pos­es of these blogs, I have assumed a base under­stand­ing of SAP indi­rect access, the SAP Dig­i­tal Access License mod­el, and the SAP Dig­i­tal Access Adop­tion Pro­gram.

Vis­it our Licens­ing Resource Cen­ter for in-depth cov­er­age of this top­ic. You can also send your ques­tions to licensing@​asug.​com or reg­is­ter for one of our licens­ing web­casts for ASUG mem­bers. Addi­tion­al­ly, we wel­come all ASUG mem­bers to sub­mit their ideas for blog posts they want to write.