Success Story · Multi-Entity Manufacturing Group

Turning a Licensing Audit Into Millions in Recovered Value

A rigorous review of actual SAP usage against what the group was paying for uncovered a licensing model built for a business roughly twice its real footprint, and a renegotiation that followed saved the group nearly half its annual SAP licence cost.

The Challenge

SAP licensing is priced on entitlement, what you are contracted to use, not necessarily what your business actually uses. Left unreviewed for years, that gap quietly compounds: new users get provisioned generously, nobody revisits the entitlement, and the invoice keeps arriving at the original, oversized number. The group's own usage data told a stark story: it was contracted for licensing sized to roughly twice its actual usage footprint, a gap worth real money every single year, on a contract already running on a fixed five-year term.

How Newen Helped

Newen ran a full utilisation review, mapping actual named-user activity across every business unit against the group's contracted licence entitlement, using both internal analysis and the platform vendor's own audit tooling to remove any ambiguity about the real numbers. The finding was unambiguous enough to take to the vendor directly: a formal renegotiation case, backed by usage evidence rather than a generic cost-cutting request, seeking entitlement realigned to actual consumption rather than the original contracted volume.

The negotiation was not won in a single conversation. Newen supported the group through multiple rounds, rejecting an initial vendor counter-proposal that did not reflect the usage evidence, before reaching a revised agreement grounded in the real numbers.

The Results

The group's licensed user entitlement was right-sized from 501 to 151, a reduction of roughly 70% in contracted volume, translating into a nearly 47% cut in annual SAP licence subscription cost. Across the remaining term of the contract, that renegotiation is worth more than ₦3 billion in avoided cost, without removing a single capability the business actually uses. The same discipline now runs as an ongoing workstream: every platform change that can affect licence consumption gets reviewed for its cost impact before it goes live, not after the next invoice arrives.