How Checker Consulting helped a global retailer beat its commercial targets by 40% — negotiating one of SAP’s most complex agreements in half the usual time.
A global retail group with more than 4,000 stores in 80 countries was forced to rethink its entire ERP migration and IT transformation strategy with only six months left before critical platform deadlines. Checker Consulting led the SAP RISE negotiation end to end, helping the client secure a seven-year agreement that outperformed every objective it set out to achieve.
Background & Challenge
A global retail client with more than 130,000 employees and roughly 4,000 stores across 80 countries was in the middle of a major platform migration and IT transformation program. The client had spent eighteen months preparing to move from an ageing on-premises ECC environment — two generations behind SAP RISE — to S/4HANA, also provisioned on-premise.
Midway through that preparation, SAP introduced an alternative path: migrating to RISE instead of continuing toward an on-premises S/4HANA deployment. This forced the client to step back and re-evaluate its IT operating model, its provisioning model, and the costs, risks and IT run-rate implications of a RISE-based future.
The timing made this especially difficult. The client was already behind schedule, with only six months left to complete an evaluation and negotiation that, under normal circumstances, would take at least twelve months. Missing that window risked running into the end-of-life dates SAP had set for the existing platform. The challenge was clear: negotiate a full RISE agreement, against demanding commercial and technical objectives, in roughly half the usual time.
Checker Consulting’s Role
Checker Consulting was engaged to lead the negotiation with SAP end to end. That meant discovering and setting the technical and commercial objectives for the deal, securing the right financing from both SAP and the chosen hyperscaler, and building an apples-to-apples business case that fairly captured transition and transformation costs, including the support required from a System Integrator. Checker was also responsible for ensuring the client’s executive management could reach a decision well before the end of the calendar year.
Our Approach
The starting point was to understand the gap between the client’s current IT run-rate and where it needed to land, since IT run rate reduction was one of the deal’s central objectives. The transition itself would carry a cost, but the overall business case still had to come out positive. Once an initial run-rate proposal was in place, Checker worked with the client to set firm objectives and scope across both the technical and commercial tracks.
To move quickly without cutting corners, Checker ran a series of parallel workshops covering the IT operating model, the future-state technical architecture, IT security and compliance, and the commercial and legal terms of the deal. These workstreams covered:
• Technical scope: choosing between public cloud, private cloud or a mix; selecting a hyperscaler; defining which applications and systems were in scope; and converting existing license usage into FTE-based metrics.
• Commercial terms: setting IT run-rate targets, building in flexibility on TOS credits, and carrying forward the legal and commercial clauses that mattered from the existing contracts.
• Funding: pushing for the highest possible contribution from both the current supplier and the selected hyperscaler.
• Legal protections: reviewing the RISE agreement template clause by clause to identify technical, legal and commercial risks; prioritizing must-haves over nice-to-haves; and securing clauses that protected the client’s ability to roll back, pause or terminate existing licenses if needed.
• Contract term: agreeing on the minimum and maximum length the client could accept.
• Business case: continuously refreshing the numbers with fresh data and challenging every cost coming from SAP and the System Integrators.
• Governance: strengthening IT governance by securing visible commitment from the supplier’s executive management and board and tracking negotiation progress so objectives could be adjusted as the deal evolved.
As the deadline approached, the pace intensified. Decisions — large and small — were anchored along the way, and in the final stretch the negotiation continued through evenings and weekends, with every party putting in substantial extra effort to meet the deadline.
Results
At 2:00 AM on December 19th, the final contracts were submitted digitally — eight hours before the signing ceremony scheduled for 10:00 AM at the client’s headquarters, attended by the client’s executive management team and representatives from the supplier. The agreement was signed, setting in motion one of the world’s largest ERP and IT transformation programs.
Measured against the original objectives, the negotiation delivered on every front:
| Area | Outcome |
| Technical scope | Core ERP on private cloud with minimal impact on the IT operating model; everything else moved to public cloud. |
| Commercial target | Overachieved by 40%, with fixed prices locked in for the full term. |
| Funding | Secured 50% more funding than originally estimated. |
| Legal | All major legal obstacles resolved. |
| Contract term | Seven-year term secured, with the option to extend to ten. |
| Business case | Remained positive throughout. |
| Governance | Strong, lasting relationship established with the supplier’s executive leadership and board. |
The outcome gave the client the confidence to commit to one of the largest agreements in its history. Checker Consulting was proud to have led this engagement from start to finish.
