Tier one automotive supplier restructures a $42M RISE proposal across a seven year term.

The opening position.

The supplier operated on a brownfield SAP ECC estate, with a S/4HANA conversion planned within thirty months. The SAP account team proposed a RISE with SAP Cloud Private Edition deployment, bundled with BTP credits, hyperscaler infrastructure on a single named provider, and a Digital Access entitlement priced against an estimated annual document volume. The headline discount on the proposal was forty four percent against list. The proposal carried a seven year term with annual uplifts capped at five percent, but the uplift floor was tied to an external index that had run at seven percent in the prior twelve months.

The supplier had three open concerns. The first was that the document volume estimate inside the Digital Access commitment looked high. The second was that the hyperscaler choice was being made without modelling against the supplier's existing networking topology. The third was that the seven year term carried no exit credit, no transition assistance commitment, and no contractual price hold beyond year three.

The engagement was scoped at fourteen weeks, with three phases. Discovery and modelling in weeks one through four. Counter proposal and negotiation in weeks five through ten. Contract finalisation and signature in weeks eleven through fourteen.

Four phase negotiation sequence.

What the model showed.

The Digital Access entitlement inside the original proposal was sized against fourteen million documents per year, with growth at twelve percent annually. The actual document volume, measured against three years of historical data from the supplier's order entry, EDI, and supplier portal systems, came in at six point eight million documents, with growth at four percent. The proposal entitlement was running at slightly more than double the volume the supplier could reasonably commit to.

The hyperscaler choice in the proposal carried a regional cost premium that the supplier had not modelled. A parallel analysis of two alternative providers produced a seven year infrastructure cost that ran twenty two percent lower, with no measurable difference in the SAP supported configuration. The BTP credit allocation inside the bundle was priced against a roadmap that included three planned integration projects, only one of which had funded business cases inside the supplier's portfolio.

The seven year price lock that the supplier wanted, with no annual uplift beyond a fixed two percent floor, was outside the standard envelope offered by the account team. The lock required executive escalation inside SAP, which the engagement triggered in week eight with an alternative proposal carrying a smaller bundled commitment and a competitive infrastructure provider.

The Digital Access entitlement was running at double the volume the supplier could reasonably commit to, and the bundled BTP credits were priced against integration projects that had no funded business case.

What changed at signature.

The final RISE contract closed at $12.4M in total contract value across seven years. The Digital Access entitlement was rebased to seven million documents per year with a true up mechanism rather than a flat commitment, removing the most volatile cost line from the contract. The hyperscaler decision was decoupled from the RISE commitment, with the supplier retaining the right to select the provider through a separate competitive process.

Seven uplift surfaces inside the original contract language were rewritten. The annual price increase was capped at three percent, with a hard ceiling rather than an external index. Exit credits worth a combined $2.1M were added against early termination scenarios. Transition assistance was committed for twelve months post termination, with data extraction in a defined open format and a maximum sixty day extraction window.

The bundled BTP credit allocation was unbundled and reduced by sixty percent, with the remainder priced against a usage based mechanism that the supplier could scale up if the integration roadmap moved. The seven year term carried a price hold across years one through four, with a documented uplift schedule across years five through seven that did not exceed nine percent cumulative.