When the use of RPA can generate non-compliance in SAP licences® e come impatta sui costi
With the rise of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) applications accessing management software (SAP®, for example) to automate tasks, to automate tasks, companies could risk non-compliance violations for not licensing their use correctly.
It is a central theme in the digital age, given the growing importance of "intelligent" bots and automatons in digital transformation. Even those companies that do not yet use them, see RPA in their future and study projects to drive innovation in the company.
Not considering RPA in licence management could easily lead to unforeseen costs: an audit in a situation that is not fully managed most often leads to the detection of non-compliant situations in the allocation of licences, which usually result in heavy and, above all, unbudgeted disbursements.
In 2018, SAP® introduced Digital Access, a new licensing model for indirect access that also considers RPA. As the adoption of the financially facilitated programme to adopt it (the Digital Access Adoption Program) expires at the end of December, we decided to take a closer look at the impact of RPA on SAP® licensing and the strategies you should adopt to calculate your risk factor.
Gartner says that "hyper-automation" will become a "survival condition" for companies.
RPA is nothing more than the robotic automation of processes through the use of software “smart”. Bots, interfaces, applications... they can execute partially or fully automatically repetitive tasks by imitating the behaviour of operators and interacting with management software in exactly the same way as a human being would.
They are useful in any field (IT, sales, customer service, etc.), even with very different objectives. The use of RPAs has the following benefits:
As much as these bots have different uses and modes (from chatbots to transaction completion applications), there are two fundamental aspects they have in common:
Third-party applications interact with ECC, and behind these interactions (extractions, processing, insertions, etc.), there could be a human user, but also a bot or an automated system that replicates human actions.
For example, we can have a digital assistant able to support the customer in the sale, or an automated EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) system which automatically inserts material orders from several sources. In both cases, in the presence or absence of the user from whom the request originated, the bot enters SAP®, exploits the processing capacity of its software and updates the values for issuing invoices/order confirmations.
These third-party applications could be owned by the company but also by partners or other stakeholders. SAP® licensing rules require that any interaction with SAP must be licensed whether it is direct or indirect.
The topic is very sensitive: a contractual mistake can cost a company a lot of money. But considering that it is automation bots that use SAP, how does the licence agreement cover these new 'users'?
In the past, the lack of clarity regarding the counting of indirect users created situations in which companies were faced with unforeseen expenses amounting to millions of Euros (a well-known and discussed case is that of Diageo UK vs SAP®: here highlights are summarised).
To make things easier for its customers, SAP® introduced the Digital Access model in 2018, which more simply identifies licence conditions by differentiating between direct human access (whose count is still based on the number of users) and indirect digital access where the cost is based on counting certain types of documents (9 to be precise) processed within SAP® digital core.
Source: SAP® official documentation
What about RPA? Within the new model, SAP® considers documents that have been handled with the assistance of bots as "use"of the software. Use is defined as "activating processing capabilities, loading, executing, accessing, using software or displaying information resulting from such capability". Each 'use' must be appropriately licensed within the SAP® contract
However, open points remain:
RPA automation can be assisted (attended) or unassisted (unattended). The former is also known as the virtual assistant and requires the user to activate the processing. While in the second case, the execution of tasks and interactions is independent of the user and the bot performs the automation itself.
This differentiation is also present in Microsoft, which for some of its products (Microsoft 365, Power Automate, etc.) provides specific licences for "unattended" scenarios. The licences are not specific to the "unattended" scenarios.
Source: Microsoft official documentation
Introducing this paradigm in SAP would distinguish between user-collaborative bots (potentially covered by a named user licence) and independent bots. But understanding the different paradigms in use is not possible with SAP® measurement tools.
Another issue to be considered is the "indirect static read", i.e. those situations in which data are exported from a system SAP® to a system that is not SAP® without updates/processing on the SAP®. digital core.
During the 2017 Sapphire conference, SAP® CEO Bill McDermott confirmed that a licence is not required for static reading by third-party systems. So this kind of interaction should be excluded. However, even here we are faced with the difficulty of tracking which RPA applications interact exclusively in static read mode.
What qualifies a named user? Here too, attention must be paid to the contract that has been concluded, especially if it predates the new licensing model. Some contracts can specify that a user is a "human" user, others cannot.
A customer may decide whether to keep the legacy contract (if the number of licences granted per user covers bot uses) or whether to adhere to the new Digital Access model, in which the number of indirect licences is granted on the basis of the estimated number of documents produced.
But if the software is licensed on a per-user basis and the licence agreement only provides for "human" users, the use of the licence by RPA bots may expose the company to unexpected licence costs and the risk of penalties.
These "risk'"situations, which are not always well-defined, require the company to have a deep knowledge of its environment and SAP® contractual arrangements. There are four steps we recommend:
This analysis must take into account the following elements:
Once this information has been collected, it must be verified whether what is stated in the LAW (License Administration Workbench) delivered to SAP in anticipation of the audit is true.
This process also requires the analysis of the contractual conditions defined with SAP®. To be able to make this comparison in quick and error-free time, it takes the help of SAM (Software Asset Management) tools certified by SAP® and integrated into its environment.
Snow Optimizer for SAP® falls into this category and is able to halve the report production time from 6 months to half a day.
With this information at your disposal, you can identify duplicates, irregularities, overlaps and always be compliant. But the most important advantage is being able to negotiate SAP® licences from a position of strength: clear knowledge of the technical and contractual situation is decisive.
Thanks to it, in fact, the customer can decide whether to keep the legacy contract already stipulated (if the number of RPA applications can be satisfied with the user licences already granted), maintaining the status quo, or to adhere to the new Digital Access model and already have an accurate estimate of the documents produced, including the transactions/interactions carried out by the RPA bots.
It is true that the customer who has not yet activated RPA projects can maintain the status quo at the contractual level, but in order to guarantee itself the best future conditions, it should be able to foresee the possible impact of RPA on its systems. In the short, but especially in the medium and long term.
That is why, in determining the most suitable licensing model, we advise companies to do an analysis of the impact of RPA on licensing. WEGG is a consulting company with many years of experience in the management of SAP licences and contracts. We will explore these topics in more detail in the webinar scheduled for 15 September.
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