Case Study
EDEKA DIGITAL saves millions of Euros on SAP® software licensing
At A Glance
IT service provider of the EDEKA Group, a retail outlet operator
Location: Germany
Employees: 400,000
Products: Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software
Featured Results
• Over €6.2 million saved in software license costs
• Significant reduction in time taken to prepare for SAP software audits
• Relevant USMM reports in a matter of minutes
• Simplified user and IT asset management activities
The Challenge
Time-consuming and unreliable license management hiked costs and inefficiencies
Founded in 1907, the EDEKA Group operates more than 11,000 retail outlets, from corner stores to hypermarkets, throughout Germany. With revenues of more than €61 billion (2020), EDEKA operates as a cooperative, with seven independent regions and a central IT organization—EDEKA DIGITAL—that also provides financial, marketing and technical support.
The EDEKA Group relies on SAP ERP solutions to manage its core business processes from head office to shop floor. Almost every single one of EDEKA’s 400,000 staff accesses the SAP systems daily.
Nico Fleisch, license manager at EDEKA DIGITAL, comments, “EDEKA has a mix of self-service, professional, developer and specially tailored “retail user” licenses from SAP, enabling us to provide exactly the right access rights for users, depending on their role. Managing user licenses and preparing for SAP audits presented a formidable task and engaged us more throughout the year to complete. In 2019, license costs for new user licenses had reached €7.5 million, without optimization of user licensing.”
Each EDEKA region is responsible for its own SAP infrastructure. Managing the SAP licenses for such a diverse group of supermarkets and corner stores was time consuming and unreliable. “We wanted to streamline our processes and save operating costs to provide a better service to the cooperative members and, of course, to our in-store customers,” remarks Fleisch. “If we could reduce the time expended on SAP audits, devote more energy to value-adding tasks, and improve IT operational efficiency—and if we could identify SAP usage at the user level—we could align our SAP licenses more closely to individual needs and gain significant savings.”
The EDEKA DIGITAL team looked for ways to reduce the time spent on SAP license audit preparation and completion. They also sought ways to reduce SAP costs by optimizing license allocations and reducing the number of user licenses they purchased.
With a nearly real-time view of our license consumption, we can constantly monitor our license allocations to ensure that we never overspend on licenses that we don’t need. What’s more, spotting and deactivating inactive user accounts now takes a matter of hours, compared to up to a month when using SAP’s built-in asset management tools.
Nico Fleisch, license manager EDEKA DIGITAL
The Solution
Superior service and swift deployment lead to enterprise-wide visibility
After reviewing applications, the EDEKA DIGITAL team invited multiple vendors to demonstrate their capabilities with pilot deployments to the EDEKA Group’s test SAP environments.
They deployed and configured Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software in a few hours. We had comprehensive support and in-depth technical information,” explains Fleisch. “The service was outstanding. It gave us great confidence that we could move Snow Optimizer for SAP® into production rapidly, securely and safely.”
Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software is a certified add-on for SAP ERP, running as part of the SAP environment and inheriting security, governance and control from the already deployed SAP system. As a result, the transaction data that Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software analyzes stays without external transfers or extracts. The solution deploys once, centrally, in the SAP environment and collates data from all the satellite systems into a single view.
“By deploying a single instance of Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software to our SAP system dedicated for the Central User Administration, we can view, process and manage license data from all the attached SAP solutions,” explains Fleisch.
The Result
Superior visibility and license optimization for drastically lowered costs
With Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software in place, EDEKA DIGITAL successfully reduced the additional cost for user licenses in 2019 from €7.5 million to just €1.3 million—a saving of €6.2 million—releasing funds for the company to invest in innovation.
Fleisch says, “Because Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software made it much easier for us to track the user license types across all our SAP instances, we were able to achieve significant savings by identifying wrongly allocated license types and optimizing license usage across the company.”
By gaining greater visibility into group-wide software licensing arrangements, EDEKA DIGITAL can prepare for SAP software audits much more efficiently.
“Using Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software, we can quickly and easily pull data on specific aspects of our SAP instances. For example, user license types and the quantity of license type usage, RAM used for processing SAP workloads and much more,” explains Fleisch. “Previously it would take us up to a year to prepare for an SAP audit, but with Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software, we can gather all of the necessary information to support an audit in less than six months—freeing up time for us to spend on value-add tasks.”
As with any large company, EDEKA has unique business processes. They initially found that some of their special requirements were not completely automated with Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software, but Fleisch says that the solution’s developers quickly implemented their important requirements into the solution.
Fleisch concludes: “We’ve successfully optimized our IT estate and streamlined many of our internal asset management processes. In turn, these actions enable our employees to dedicate more time to delivering excellent service. They also provide significant financial savings which we can reinvest in growing EDEKA.”
SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.
