How to bring legal, procurement, and IT into one RISE position.

RISE with SAP negotiations stall when the buyer organisation arrives at the table with three positions in one room. The legal team is reading the contract for risk and termination. The procurement team is reading the price for movement and benchmarks. The IT team is reading the architecture for fit and migration cost. Each function is doing its job. The problem is that SAP can see the gaps between the three positions before the buyer can, and an experienced account team will work the gaps for as long as the buyer leaves them open. The work of bringing legal, procurement, and IT into a single coherent RISE position is the work that makes everything that follows possible.

01.Map the three lenses on a RISE deal

Legal reads the order form and the General Terms and Conditions for risk. The lens is termination rights, audit rights, data protection commitments, indemnities, limitations of liability, and the dispute resolution mechanism. Legal does not always have a strong view on price, but it has a very strong view on which clauses produce post signature regret. Legal often arrives later in the negotiation than the other two functions, which means the deal has often been shaped before the lens that matters most for the back half of the term has been applied.

Procurement reads the price for movement. The lens is the discount stack, the unit pricing, the bundle, the volume commitments, and the comparable deals that benchmark the offer. Procurement is comfortable applying pressure and is comfortable with a multi vendor approach. Procurement is sometimes less comfortable with the architecture conversation, which limits its ability to argue against bundle composition.

IT reads the architecture for fit. The lens is the workload list, the integration points, the migration cost, the operational model, and the support implications. IT often has the deepest relationship with SAP, because the technical teams have been working with SAP people for years. That depth is a strength and a weakness. The strength is that IT knows what works. The weakness is that the relationship can make it hard for IT to argue against the architectural choices SAP is recommending.

Each lens is correct in isolation. None of the three lenses is sufficient on its own. The buyer that arrives at a RISE table with one lens, or with three uncoordinated lenses, is the buyer that leaves the table with a deal that satisfies one function and disappoints the other two.

02.Build a shared problem statement before SAP arrives

The first step is to lock down a shared problem statement that the three functions all sign. The statement is a one page document. It defines what the organisation wants out of the RISE deal, what it is unwilling to compromise on, and what it is willing to trade. The statement is written before SAP starts presenting numbers, because once SAP starts presenting numbers, the problem statement gets rewritten under pressure.

The shared problem statement has four parts. The strategic objective. The non negotiable constraints. The trade space. The walk away condition. Each part is short. Each part has consensus across legal, procurement, and IT before the statement is finalised. The work of getting consensus often surfaces disagreements between the functions that need to be resolved internally before SAP can be allowed to see them externally.

The walk away condition is the most important and the most often skipped. The walk away is the set of conditions under which the buyer will end the negotiation and pursue an alternative. The walk away is rarely used. The walk away is always required. A negotiation without a defined walk away is a negotiation without leverage, because the only person in the room who knows there is no walk away is the buyer, and SAP can see it in the buyer's behaviour even if no one says it.

The strategic objective should be one sentence. The constraints should be three to five items. The trade space should be three to five items. The walk away should be one paragraph. The whole document fits on one page. The page is then shared with the executive sponsor, signed, and treated as the operating document for the engagement.

03.Set the joint information architecture

The three functions need to share information through a single channel. Each function has its own systems, its own meeting cadence, and its own reporting structure. Left alone, those three structures produce three different versions of the same conversation. SAP will see all three versions, often through three different SAP contacts, and will pick the version that is most favourable to SAP's position.

The joint information architecture has four components. A shared document repository. A shared question tracker. A weekly cross functional standup. A single communication owner for all SAP facing exchanges. The communication owner does not need to be senior. The communication owner needs to be disciplined. Every SAP request goes through the communication owner. Every SAP response is logged in the shared question tracker. Every meaningful document lives in the shared repository.

The shared question tracker is the highest leverage element. Most RISE engagements generate fifty to one hundred questions across the term of the negotiation. The questions are asked by different functions, answered by different SAP contacts, and stored in different email inboxes. Without a shared tracker, the answers are inconsistent. With a shared tracker, the inconsistencies surface, and the buyer can challenge SAP on them. SAP rarely contradicts itself, but SAP will provide answers that are technically true while leaving important context out. The shared tracker is what allows the buyer to spot when context has been left out.

The weekly standup is a thirty minute meeting. The agenda has three items. What changed this week. What we expect SAP to do next week. What we will say to SAP next week. The standup is short because the work happens between standups. The discipline is in keeping the meeting short and in finishing it with a single agreed position for the coming week.

04.Choose one lead and define the others' role

Every RISE engagement needs a single negotiation lead. The lead is the buyer side counterpart to the SAP account team. The lead carries the strategic objective into every meeting. The lead can be from any of the three functions, but the lead is one person. The other two functions have defined supporting roles, and those roles are agreed before SAP is invited into the conversation.

If the lead is from procurement, legal and IT contribute through the shared information architecture. If the lead is from IT, procurement and legal contribute the same way. If the lead is from legal, the same again. The choice of lead depends on the shape of the deal. A renewal where the architecture is settled often suits a procurement lead. A first conversion where the architecture is the dominant question often suits an IT lead. A high risk deal with complex audit or data protection implications often suits a legal lead.

The roles of the supporting functions need to be specific. Legal reviews every contract clause as it is proposed and counter proposed. Procurement maintains the financial model and the benchmark dataset. IT maintains the architectural reference and the workload inventory. None of the supporting functions interacts with SAP without the lead in the room or in the loop. The lead is the only person who can commit the buyer to anything.

The supporting roles are also responsible for raising concerns inside the buyer organisation rather than across the SAP boundary. If procurement disagrees with the lead's pricing approach, the disagreement is resolved at the weekly standup, not in a side channel to SAP. SAP is never the audience for buyer side disagreements. The internal alignment is the negotiation. The external conversation is the consequence.

05.Manage SAP's tactic of splitting the buyer

An experienced SAP account team will split the buyer if the buyer allows it. The tactic looks like a series of helpful side conversations. The account executive calls procurement to talk about pricing. The technical specialist calls IT to talk about architecture. The legal specialist calls legal to talk about contract language. Each conversation is reasonable on its own. Together, they fragment the buyer position and create three slightly different versions of the same deal.

The countermeasure is the single channel rule. Every SAP communication touches the communication owner. The communication owner does not have to attend every meeting, but every meeting is scheduled through the owner and every output is logged in the shared tracker. SAP is told once, politely, that the buyer organisation operates through a single point of contact for this engagement. SAP will adjust. The adjustment is what produces the leverage.

The other split tactic is the parallel timeline. SAP will sometimes accelerate one workstream while letting another lag, which forces the buyer to make a decision on one element of the deal before the other elements are ready. The countermeasure is the joint roadmap. The buyer sets the sequence of decisions, not SAP. The buyer is willing to decline to make a decision on element A until element B has caught up. The willingness to decline is the discipline that makes the parallel timeline tactic fail.

When the buyer holds the single channel and the joint roadmap, the engagement runs on the buyer's tempo. Tempo is leverage. The buyer that controls tempo is the buyer that closes the deal that matches the strategic objective the three functions agreed on day one.

The internal alignment is the negotiation. The external conversation with SAP is the consequence. Buyers who fix that order finish their engagements with the deal they wrote on day one.

06.Conclusion

A RISE negotiation that pulls legal, procurement, and IT into one position is a negotiation that finishes with one deal. A RISE negotiation that lets the three functions arrive separately is a negotiation that finishes with three half deals. The work of building the shared problem statement, the joint information architecture, the named lead, and the single channel rule takes two weeks of internal effort. That two weeks is the highest leverage two weeks of the engagement. Skip it and SAP will set the tempo. Invest it and the three functions speak with one voice for the rest of the term.