Eursap's Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Sharon Ryan

Eursap's Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Sharon Ryan.

This month, we feature Sharon Ryan. Sharon is based in the UK and is an expert in the murky and hugely complicated world of SAP licensing. This is an area where even the most polished SAP consultants can become unstuck! Sharon is a partner in the company Xactitud, providing licensing intelligence for SAP customers. Let’s have a chat with Sharon and see how she helps!

You’ve built an impressive career in SAP. What initially drew you to the SAP ecosystem, and what has kept you passionate about it over the years?

I fell into it, you might say. A previous employer was setting up a global SAP practice around the same time I joined, and I found myself in the right place at the right time. I’ve never looked back.

Trite, but no two days are the same. You can be knee-deep in contracts and spreadsheets one day, hosting a license strategy workshop the next or spend another day mapping out business processes and assessing integrations between SAP and non-SAP applications. Last year I had to give a workshop to 40+ senior Enterprise Architects on the topic of SAP Digital Access, that was a day that kept me on my toes! I’ve been lucky enough to deliver SAP licensing projects all over the world for some renowned brands. I get restless easily, the variety of tasks and the ever-evolving SAP trends keep me entertained.

Tell us about Xactitud. How can it help SAP clients?

We specialise only in SAP licensing and support customers wanting to understand and drive value from their SAP license investments. The types of projects typically fall into three main areas:

•  License Optimisation, where SAP customers aim to extract maximum value from their existing investment, often as part of cost‑saving initiatives.
•  License Transformation, where customers want clarity on the license migration options available and how these translate into contractual commitments, TCO, and licence modelling.
•  License Restructuring, which supports customers undergoing M&A activity or organisational change who need help defining both their current‑state landscape and their future‑state design.

In a lot of the projects we deliver, we work alongside the customer explaining the process as we go along so they are set up for success even after the project winds up.

In fact, we’re just about to take this even further and launch an “insourcing” service (working name!) for SAP customers that have no interest in a managed service, but need a one-off support in terms of upskilling internal resources on how to measure and interpret the usage data of their RISE with SAP cloud services, system set-up, user classification, and so on. Basically, knowledge transfer of “what they don’t know they don’t know”.

What do you see as the biggest overlooked factor clients face in understanding licensing for SAP?

The sheer complexity. For example, if you are migrating to RISE with SAP, you might be forgiven for thinking there’s only 5-6 documents to review based on looking at a cloud order form template. However, if you dig deeper, you’ll observe most cloud services will have at least one dedicated supplemental terms and conditions document. Here, applying the same principles and assumptions of negotiating an on-premise license deal with a RISE with SAP is a recipe for disaster. It’s important to allow sufficient time to better understand what’s required. Your balance sheet and your relationship with SAP will be all the better for it.

With the move to the cloud, SAP licensing has become so much more complicated, especially with licensing options like Indirect Access Licensing. Is there a simple way for clients to decode any of the noise?

For the foreseeable future, I don’t think there’s a simple way but there’s certainly a structured way. Getting the basics right goes a long way e.g. (i) full and complete view of all SAP license agreements, entitlement, rights and support fees, mapping, (ii) tracking who is responsible for providing self-declaration data for specific products, (iii) robust user license classification matrix and on/off-boarding, (iv) integration on-boarding (to avoid digital access surprises), to name just a few.

To give SAP their due, they’ve really ramped up support for their customers in the form of SAP for Me, SAM4U, better measurement guides and so on. 

Are there other areas you can help SAP clients other than licensing?

I’ve helped customers with non-SAP M&A-related licensing queries, (closed quite a few of these transactions during my time as a license compliance manager) and entitlement / application baselining (FinOps?) per business process. Here, there are very transferable skills from Indirect / Digital Access assessments where you need to map non-SAP applications across all business processes to understand the risk.

If a customer came looking for the above, we’d help out for sure. But other than that, we stay in our lane and won’t be expanding into other areas of SAP or other vendors. Based on feedback provided, SAP customers like the fact all our time and resources are dedicated to SAP licensing and SAP partners like that they can plug us into a customer with no conflict of interest. We can often get the needle moving on SAP discussions that have stalled because we provide objective facts. For example, perhaps an SAP customer might be doubtful of a reseller advising them they need to purchase additional licenses but won’t be of us. 

SAP careers often require constant upskilling. How do you stay ahead of new releases, methodologies, and certifications, especially in the licensing space, which is fiendishly complicated?

Voracious networking and reading. I have multiple conversations daily with various SAP customers and partners, and I’ve been known to read KBA articles on the train to work! I also interact with a lot of technical SAP experts to try and see the bigger picture.

From your experience, what are the biggest challenges organisations face when implementing or modernizing SAP, and how does Xactitud help them navigate those challenges?

Knowing how to “get going” and what should be done and when is a big challenge faced by many organisations. Or lack of visibility on documentation to review and decisions that need to be made in advance of signing up to RISE with SAP.

One example would be that I find many customers focus on the Bill of Materials for their intended new solution but may not be aware of the Roles & Responsibilities matrix, which outlines what’s included, excluded or has thresholds.

In all our projects, we “hold the customer’s hand” and ensure they understand what needs to be done and why, the benefit of key activities and impact of not doing so. 

In terms of licensing specific tasks, this can take the form of measuring their existing SAP licenses and mapping functionality they intend to keep using to SAP cloud service equivalents, understanding the digital access licensing impact of retiring and/or introducing SAP functionality, modelling requirements on future growth or organisational changes, reviewing paperwork, etc.

With SAP’s shift toward cloud solutions like S/4HANA Cloud, what do you see as the most critical success factor for customers moving to the cloud?

Caveating that I’m not a technical person, I believe the most critical success factor is to NOT view migrating to SAP S/4HANA Cloud as just an expensive and necessary technical upgrade but as an opportunity for real business transformation that supports company goals. There’s a lot of great functionality included in even the base offering of RISE with SAP but if you don’t take the time to understand it, the value remains unlocked. 

SAP is evolving at breakneck speed and the next few years will only see that accelerate. What major innovations or trends do you think will define the SAP landscape in the next 5–10 years?

I wouldn’t be surprised if SAP’s increased focus on public cloud and fit to standard, combined with advancements in AI, meant that it will soon be possible for SAP customers to subscribe to, on demand, and immediately access functionality that same day or week, negating the requirement for prolonged sales cycles or implementation projects. This would make their solutions more accessible to the SMB market. In terms of trends, I believe there will be an increased focus on defence and climate.

How do you see AI and automation reshaping SAP roles and the consultant skillset?

I think it will significantly widen the gap between good and bad consultants. The good consultants will use AI to sharpen their saw or reduce the effort required to perform existing tasks. The bad ones will use it in lieu of their brains. I think we’re already seeing this, I expect it will get worse over time.

Many companies still hesitate to begin their S/4HANA journey. Why do you think that is and what would you say to leaders who are sitting on the fence?

Information overload, rapidly evolving technologies and external economic forces in no particular order. I would say to leaders sitting on the fence to use the time to do two things: (i) network and learn as much as you can on the topic instead of listening to either fear-inducing horror stories or marketing hyperbole. Get past this and focus on the facts, and (ii) ensure you have visibility not only on the options available to you but any timebound implications.

SAP programs can be complex and high-pressure. What leadership principles guide the way you manage teams, stakeholders, and delivery risk?

Align project activities with vision / objectives “in order to achieve X, we must do Y by Z”. In our project management templates, each activity will have a dependency (what preceding task needs to be completed prior) and an assigned resource to ensure accountability by everyone involved.

Hope for the best but plan for the worst. In any given project, I am more likely to repeatedly ask our customers, "is there anything they are unhappy/uncertain about so that we can proactively iron out any creases and build in any necessary actions", before issues even arise. 

Finally, treat everyone, at all levels, with the same level of respect. And remember you are fortunate the customer has selected you, not the other way round. People remember how you make them feel.

What about yourself, Sharon. Any hobbies or interests?

Hosting lunch / dinner parties, walking, spending time with family and friends, logic puzzles, mafia-themed films, being my Parson Russell’s slave and I’ve recently taken up ice-skating again.

And if you weren’t in an SAP career, what would you be doing now?

I’d retrain as a tax accountant or a trader.

What’s the most humorous or unexpected SAP issue you’ve ever encountered on a project (that you can safely share)?

A CIO recently offered to abduct me from a train and glue me to my laptop, so urgently he needed an unexpected task delivered. If you’re feeling worried for my safety – don’t – it was one of those entertaining “you had to be there” conversations!

Finally, the question we always like to finish on: For newer SAP consultants who want to reach “guru” status, what’s the advice you always give? What mindset or habits matter most?

Do the hard graft, you will be all the better for it in the long run. My first few years as an SAP licensing consultant, I did a lot of the heavy lifting for more senior resources and the benefit to having done so is that you can talk to everyone on their playing field.

For example, a senior procurement stakeholder might not understand asking an SAP Basis Consultant to run a LAW Report for 80+ systems without a tool is not a quick and easy task but if you’ve previously done that yourself you can help jump in, reframe expectations and bring everyone along and deliver a successful project!

Never assume you know everything, don’t waffle or BS your customers or partners, and treat every project as Day 1.