A recent example is the Diageo ruling in February 2017, which highlighted SAP’s stance on indirect access. Diageo wanted to empower its business customers and sales representatives through a Salesforce system, which connect to its back-end SAP.

The high court ruled that by connecting its Salesforce system to SAP, Diageo was using the core ERP in an unlicensed way. The sales team and each and every business customer was considered a SAP professional user, which incurs the highest licence fee. Diageo was fined £55 million for the unlicensed use SAP.

Canavan said businesses need to ensure they have licenced SAP optimally, to meet the requirements of different groups of users. “Many business still continue to buy licences and fail to reuse licences. To validate that, users who are running SAP are still at the company,” he said.

He suggested that if user email accounts hardwire to the Microsoft Active Directory, IT can suspend both email access and access to software when the user leaves. Going further, Canavan recommended IT departments consider using a configuration management database (CMDB) to ensure users are only given access to software when they need actually it.

“If you have a CMDB, you stand a better chance of shutting down software when people leave or move off projects,” he said.

There should be a periodic assessment of the level of use of SAP, said Canavan. This means IT needs to look closely at their expenditure, such as how many of the £9,000 professional user license they require.

Among the issues businesses should be wary of when trying to maximise their SAP investment is that SAP may offer tempting software bundle deals, which include extra modules either free or heavily discounted.

“If the SAP salesman has got in before the system designer you may find you buy extra modules. People may not use all these modules,” said Canavan. However, these modules still incur an annual maintenance charge, even if they remain unused. “You have to ensure you right-size the licences based on how the modules are actually used,” he added.

Businesses also need to assess whether the additional cost of upgrading a running SAP system can be justified.

In a recent Computer Weekly article, Sebastian Grady, president of third-party SAP maintenance provider, Rimini Street, wrote: “SAP ECC6 – SAP’s flagship product – is an incredibly robust set of business applications containing more than 400 million lines of code, with many customers adding millions more in custom code to meet their business and specific industry needs.

“It appears, however, that innovation into this core product has slowed to a snail’s pace, and many customers are finding it harder to justify the high and rising costs of upgrades and maintenance and, more recently, the push towards its cloud product S/4 Hana.”