The RISE with SAP support model cost optimisation challenge is not a one-time event. Every term year, the compounding effect of Enterprise Support escalators, BTP credit mismanagement, and shelfware retention accumulates. An enterprise that fails to optimise at signature, and then fails again at the first renewal, can easily overspend by 35–50% on support costs over a 5-year RISE term compared to a well-negotiated contract on an identical licence base.
This guide covers practical cost optimisation tactics — some applicable before you sign, some applicable in-contract, and some reserved for the renewal window. All are based on what independent advisors with direct RISE negotiation experience have achieved for enterprise buyers. For the full overview of the RISE with SAP support model, see the complete enterprise guide.
The most expensive support cost is the 22% applied to licences you are not using. Shelfware — software licences that are purchased, paid for, and generating annual support fees but not actively deployed or only partially deployed — is endemic in enterprise SAP environments. Estimates from independent licence consultancies suggest that 20–40% of the average enterprise SAP licence portfolio is effectively shelfware at any given point in time.
In a RISE contract, this shelfware problem is compounded. RISE bundles products — S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, BTP credits, additional cloud services — that many enterprises will not deploy fully within the initial contract period. Each bundled product included in the BoM (Bill of Materials) generates an ongoing support cost even if deployed at zero or minimal utilisation.
The tactic: commission an independent ELP (Effective Licence Position) analysis before RISE signature. This identifies the gap between what is on your current BoM and what you actually need. Renegotiate the BoM to remove confirmed shelfware before the 22% Enterprise Support rate is applied. A 25% reduction in the licence base translates to a 25% reduction in the annual support fee — compounded over five years, this is transformative.
Do not accept SAP's BoM as the starting point for your RISE contract. Commission an independent ELP analysis using your actual usage data from USMM (User System Measurement) and LAW (Licence Administration Workbench). Remove confirmed shelfware. Reclassify users where the evidence supports it. Negotiate the BoM down before support fees are calculated. Then ensure any removed products cannot be re-added at SAP's discretion without your explicit written approval.
SAP's standard RISE contract includes an annual escalation mechanism applied to the Enterprise Support fee. This escalator — typically indexed to a Consumer Price Index measure or a fixed annual percentage — compounds silently. At 3% annual escalation, the support fee in year five is 16% higher than in year one, on the same licence base. At 5%, it is 28% higher. Over the life of a multi-year RISE term, uncapped escalation is one of the most significant cost drivers in the entire contract.
The challenge: SAP routinely presents the escalation mechanism as non-negotiable. It is not. The enterprises that negotiate hardest on this point — particularly those with large contract values and credible alternative options on the table — consistently achieve caps of 2% or less, with some securing zero escalation on Enterprise Support in the first two years as a signing concession.
Negotiate the escalation cap as a distinct item, separate from any headline licence discount conversation. Frame it as a total cost of ownership issue, not a rates issue. Bring a multi-year cost model to the table that shows SAP the compounding effect of their proposed escalator — this forces a fact-based conversation rather than a positional one.
On a £2M annual Enterprise Support base:
SAP Business Technology Platform credits bundled into RISE contracts represent one of the most consistently mismanaged cost elements in enterprise RISE deployments. The typical enterprise consumes between 60–70% of its BTP credit allocation in the first contract year — with the remainder expiring unused under SAP's default 12-month credit validity window. This wasted credit effectively increases the real cost-per-unit of the services you do use.
Two categories of tactic are available. The first is consumption optimisation: understanding exactly which BTP services consume credits, at what rate, and building a consumption roadmap that front-loads high-priority use cases while deferring lower-priority ones to align with credit availability. This requires BTP service plan transparency — insist on receiving a BTP consumption schedule from SAP at signing, with credit burn rates for each service you plan to use.
The second is structural: negotiate credit rollover provisions. SAP can agree to extend credit validity from 12 to 24 months. Some enterprises successfully negotiate a credit pool mechanism where unused credits are reallocated to the following year's allocation rather than expiring. Without this provision, every unused credit is a direct cost to your enterprise — you paid for it, it expired, and SAP retains the economic benefit.
For a comprehensive analysis of BTP credit management, see RISE with SAP BTP credits: the complete enterprise guide.
Our SAP support cost reduction service identifies savings across Enterprise Support fees, BTP credit utilisation, and licence base optimisation — in-contract and at renewal. We work exclusively on the buyer side with zero SAP affiliation.
Book a Free Cost Review →User licence types under RISE with SAP — Professional, Limited Professional, Employee, Developer — carry substantially different price points. Professional licences are typically 3–5x more expensive than Limited Professional licences on a per-user basis. Enterprise Support at 22% is applied to this entire named user portfolio. Systematically reclassifying users to the most appropriate (lower-cost) licence type where their actual system usage supports it is one of the most direct cost optimisation levers available in-contract.
SAP's USMM (User System Measurement) tool measures actual system activity and can be used to identify users whose activity patterns do not justify their current Professional licence classification. The challenge is that SAP's measurement tools are configured to identify upgrades (users doing more than their licence permits) — not downgrades (users doing less than their licence requires). You need to run your own analysis, using the same raw data that USMM surfaces, to build the case for reclassification.
Named user reclassification should be an annual discipline, not a one-time exercise. User populations change. People leave. Roles change. Applications that drove Professional-level system access get retired or redesigned. Each annual review is an opportunity to right-size the named user cost base that drives your Enterprise Support calculation. Our SAP named user reclassification guide covers the full process.
Establish a formal annual review process using USMM data to identify users whose actual system activity supports reclassification to a lower-cost licence type. Challenge SAP's classification methodology with evidence from your own system measurement data. For users who have left the organisation, ensure immediate removal from the active named user count. Even a 10% reduction in Professional-classified users can generate a meaningful reduction in the Enterprise Support fee base.
The renewal of a RISE with SAP contract is a significant commercial event — one that SAP's account team prepares for extensively and far in advance. Most enterprises prepare too late, or not at all. The result is that renewal negotiations happen on SAP's timeline, with SAP's data, and in SAP's preferred format — typically a proposal that adds products, increases fees, and presents the existing shelfware base as a natural starting point for the next term.
The corrective tactic: begin renewal preparation 18 months before your contract end date. At 18 months, initiate an internal review of actual system usage versus licensed position. At 12 months, run your independent ELP analysis and identify the gap between what you have and what you need. At 9 months, engage SAP formally with your alternative scenarios — including competitive alternatives, GROW with SAP options, and potential scope reductions. At 6 months, you should be in active commercial negotiation with your own data, your own model, and your own target outcome defined.
SAP's commercial incentive is to renew and expand. Your commercial objective is to renew at the right size, the right price, and with the right protections. These objectives are not aligned. The enterprises that achieve the best renewal outcomes are those that recognise this mismatch and prepare accordingly. Our 18-month renewal action plan provides the full preparation framework.
RISE with SAP includes a bundled infrastructure layer provided through SAP's hyperscaler partners — AWS, Azure, or GCP. SAP applies a margin to the underlying hyperscaler cost and presents the infrastructure as a single bundled line item in the RISE subscription. This bundling creates a structural opacity that prevents enterprises from benchmarking the infrastructure component against what they could procure directly.
The cost optimisation tactic here is disclosure and benchmarking. Request the specific hyperscaler SKUs, compute specifications, storage allocations, and network egress volumes included in your RISE subscription. Use this information to build a comparable direct-procurement cost model. In negotiations where the RISE infrastructure cost is demonstrably higher than the direct-procurement equivalent, this creates genuine commercial leverage.
Additionally, investigate whether your organisation's existing enterprise agreements with hyperscalers — Microsoft Azure, AWS, or GCP — contain credits or committed spend provisions that could offset RISE infrastructure costs through a side arrangement. Some enterprises successfully negotiate a dual-track structure where RISE includes a reduced infrastructure margin alongside an independent hyperscaler credit arrangement. See our guide to negotiating hyperscaler credits alongside SAP RISE for details.
Our RISE with SAP advisory team conducts forensic cost analysis across every RISE cost component — Enterprise Support, BTP credits, infrastructure, and named users. We sit exclusively on the buyer side and have never worked for SAP. Book a free consultation to understand where your RISE contract is over-charging you.
Get Your RISE Cost Analysed →SAP's Enterprise Support contract includes obligations to deliver defined support services — knowledge transfer, solution support, and various proactive engagement activities. Many enterprises never exercise their right to service credits when SAP fails to deliver these services at the contracted standard. This is partly because the credits are not automatically applied — you must claim them — and partly because the process for doing so is not clearly documented in standard RISE contracts.
The tactic: audit your Enterprise Support deliverables annually. Compare what SAP is contractually obligated to deliver against what was actually delivered. For any shortfall, file a formal service credit claim. In parallel, negotiate at signing to have service credits applied automatically rather than requiring manual claims — this removes the administrative burden and increases the likelihood that credits are applied consistently.
For a broader perspective on Enterprise Support cost reduction, including alternatives to SAP's own support offering, see our guide on SAP Enterprise Support alternatives in 2026.
Named users who are no longer active — former employees, contractors whose engagements have ended, merged-entity users from acquisitions that have been consolidated — continue to generate licence fees and Enterprise Support costs until they are explicitly removed. SAP's measurement tools do not automatically remove inactive users. Your internal IT and HR processes may not be integrated with your SAP licence management function. The result is an accumulation of inactive named user licences that costs money every month.
Implement a formal inactive user identification and removal process, running at minimum on a quarterly basis. Use SAP's Last Login Date data from USMM, cross-referenced against HR system records, to identify users who have not accessed SAP in the preceding 90 days. For each confirmed inactive user, remove the licence and ensure the removal is reflected in the next annual licence true-up. The savings are direct and immediate — every removed Professional licence eliminates both the licence fee and the 22% Enterprise Support charge applied to that licence value.
For the full process, see our SAP inactive user cleanup guide.
Yes, but options are more limited than at signature. In-contract optimisation typically focuses on named user reclassification, inactive user removal, BTP credit consumption management, and enterprise support credit claims. Major cost reductions — licence base renegotiation, escalation cap changes, fundamental SLA restructuring — generally require the renewal window or a formal contract amendment negotiation.
Based on engagements our team has conducted, enterprises that optimise proactively at signature typically achieve 20–35% reduction in total support cost over a 5-year term relative to SAP's initial proposal. In-contract optimisation programmes typically deliver 10–20% reduction. The variance depends on the quality of the initial contract, the size of the licence base, and the extent of shelfware accumulation.
Technically, Standard Support and RISE with SAP are incompatible — RISE contracts require Enterprise Support as a minimum. However, there is variation in what Enterprise Support includes in practice, and it is possible to negotiate additional Enterprise Support deliverables (knowledge transfer sessions, premium access sessions, proactive monitoring) that increase the value received for the 22% fee, even if the rate itself cannot be lowered.
Material changes to the licence base — significant user count reductions, removal of bundled products, changes to deployment scope — typically require a formal contract amendment. These amendments are negotiated with SAP's commercial team and require the same rigour as the original contract negotiation. Approaching a contract amendment without independent support significantly reduces your ability to protect the cost improvements you are seeking.
Internal teams lack one critical input: benchmark data on what SAP has agreed with comparable enterprises. Without this, you cannot distinguish between SAP's "this is non-negotiable" and "this is what we hope you'll accept." Our SAP license optimisation advisory provides that benchmark intelligence alongside forensic analysis of your specific contract — the combination consistently outperforms what internal teams achieve alone.
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Former SAP executives, contract managers, and licence auditors — now working exclusively for enterprise buyers. Independent SAP licensing advisory — not affiliated with SAP SE. Learn about our team →
Our SAP support cost reduction service identifies and realises savings across every element of your RISE support spend — before signature, in-contract, and at renewal. Buyer-side only. Zero SAP affiliation.
Book a Free Cost Optimisation Review →Independent SAP licensing advisory — not affiliated with SAP SE