This blog contains experience gained over the years of implementing (and de-implementing) large scale IT applications/software.

Calculating FUEs for RISE with SAP S/4HANA from ECC

If you are an existing SAP ECC customer, you might be wondering what FUE capacity is needed for a target S/4HANA system in a RISE subscription?

Great news!, if you feel this might be TL;DR, you can now watch my video below:

FUE – Full Usage Equivalent, is the “license metric” for RISE with SAP S/4HANA. When you move from an on-premise license model, to a RISE subscription, you no longer use the old perpetual license model. Instead user quantities are described through the FUE metric, which is used to calculate the RISE subscription size, which includes number of users, quantity of environments included in the subscription cost, where it can be hosted and other RISE benefit entitlements.

It’s all about the FUE!

The FUE model is weighted like so:

Weighting FactorUse Type
0.5SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Developer Access
1SAP S/4HANA Cloud for advanced use
5SAP S/4HANA Cloud for core use
30SAP S/4HANA Cloud for self-service use


The above means that 1x Developer user account (i.e. a user with development authorisations) in RISE with SAP S/4HANA, will consume a value of 1 divided by 0.5 = 2 FUE.
The higher the FUE, the likely higher the cost of the RISE subscription within the defined subscription t-shirt sizes.

Q: Why does a developer consume so much FUE?
A: It’s all because of the authorisations and ability to access the system and consume resources. The more restrictive the access and minimal resource consumption, the less FUE.
Look at the self-service use usage type. This is for a specific set of transactions and resources that a user can consume.

Pre-calculating your RISE with SAP S/4HANA FUE number can help you to evaluate your potential RISE t-shirt size and what benefits you may get along with your RISE subscription.
Unfortunately, even knowing the FUE will not help you determine an exact cost, due to other factors such as size of the SAP system, number of environments, types of additional environments and other infrastructure or operational extras that you may need. But at least with the FUE you may be able to understand the basic RISE subscription size, and from there you can calculate the potential extra costs with the help of a Cloud Architect certified for RISE with SAP.

If you are running ECC (or S/4HANA on-prem) and would like to know a rough FUE number right now, you can use the report SLIM_USER_CLF_HELP_F01 from SAP note 3113382 for BASIS 702 to 758.
For older BASIS 700 and 701 then SAP note 3308470 should be referenced.

Attached on those above mentioned notes are Excel mapping files.
The ABAP reports use existing role authorisations assigned to existing users, to determine the approximate FUE breakdown.
For those customers on ECC, this estimate cannot account for any role changes made during your business transformation when moving to S/4HANA.
Don’t forget that it is using *existing* users, so make sure that you try and exclude old/defunct/retired user accounts.

There are pre-requisite notes when implementing the above notes, and SAP states that the output from the report is just a rough estimate, consider also using the FREE SAP Trusted Authorisation Review service (STAR): https://support.sap.com/en/my-support/systems-installations/glac/s4-trusted-auth-review.html

Release 2023 of SAP S/4HANA Last Target

The 2023 release of SAP S/4HANA is due in October 2023.
This release is likely the last release that existing SAP ERP customers can reasonably migrate to.

Here’s why

Any customer migrating to S/4HANA from SAP ERP will need to perform all the analysis and preparation work against this 2023 S/4HANA release (functional capabilities will be known).

The next S/4HANA release will be in late 2025 because after the 2023 release the product moves to a new 2 year release cycle (instead of annually).

This 2025 date is likely to be too late for any reasonably large customer to migrate to, as it would leave only 2 years until 2027 (end of maintenance for SAP ERP) and taking into consideration of the start of end-of-maintenance of Compatibility Scope items (see my other post about those here).

Running an SAP ERP to S/4HANA migration project quicker than 2 years is possible, but this depends heavily on existing environment complexity.

I would bet that for most, 2023 is *the* target S/4HANA release.  The saint release as I’m calling it.

Reference link: https://news.sap.com/2022/09/new-sap-s4hana-release-maintenance-strategy/