$4B Food Processing Company Achieves Best-In-Class Deal and a 35% Reduction in Overall Fees in Move to S/4HANA

Overview

A $4B Food Processing company embarked on a transformation program to move their current ERP landscape to S/4HANA. They sought to run in parallel the following initiatives:

1. SI RFP (IBM, Accenture, and Deloitte)
2. Hyperscaler RFP (AWS and Azure)
3. S/4HANA negotiation (both RISE and Perpetual models)
4. S2P evaluation (Ariba and Coupa)

Given the number of concurrent and interrelated sourcing initiatives, the client engaged UpperEdge to support all 4 Workstreams. UpperEdge provided Cost & Effort templates, Market Benchmarking, and Detailed Negotiation Strategies that enabled the client to realize Highly Competitive to Best-in-Class deals across all 4 parallel workstreams.

Approach

UpperEdge provided guidance and market insight into an overall go-to-market strategy to evaluate and negotiate Hyperscaler Infrastructure and Hyperscaler Migration Services as well as evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of SAP RISE.

This formed 4 distinct workstreams, which provided optionality into the deployment options described above:

• SAP Software
• S2P evaluation
• SI RFP
• Hyperscaler Evaluation

Leveraging deep market knowledge and a proven negotiation approach, UpperEdge enabled the client to build a detailed 10-year TCO option analysis that led to the selection and negotiation of SAP RISE and Coupa with IBM providing System Integration.

Negotiated Outcome

As a result of UpperEdge’s negotiation strategy, the client was able to achieve Best-in-Class deals for SAP, Coupa, and IBM and Highly Competitive deals for AWS. The following are the results from each individual deal:

SAP RISE Highlights: 

• Achieved 14% Reduction in overall fees from initial proposal and Best-in-Class discounting
  • Obtained Best-in-Class commercial terms, including cost transparency, ramped subscription commitment, price and renewal protections, Swap Rights and infrastructure warranty

S2P Highlights:

• Obtained 35% reduction in overall fees from initial proposal and Best-in-Class discounting
• Achieved Best-in-Class commercial terms including ramp v. discount option, renewal and volume price protections as well as Swap Rights

IBM SI Deal Highlights:

• Negotiated 8% reduction in total fees without decreasing scope and Highly Competitive/Best-in-Class rate discounting
• Obtained Best-in-Class fixed fee contingency as well as highly competitive rate locks, holdback/forfeiture models, and flexible commercial models (Fixed & T&M)

AWS Deal Highlights:

• Negotiated Highly Competitive/Best-in-Class investment credits
• Obtained Highly Competitive commercial terms and validated RISE infrastructure sizing to avoid undersized estimate from SAP

UpperEdge helps companies form strategic relationships with SAP and their cloud services providers to achieve best-in-class deals. Explore our SAP advisory services and cloud advisory services to see how we can help you maximize the value of your key IT agreements.