Relentless pressure to simultaneously grow the company and be profitable at the same time. Sound familiar? This is the new reality for manufacturing leaders today. These demands come from the board, senior executives, and shareholders, as well as consumers who want the latest and greatest technologies, features, and styles at their fingertips – all at affordable prices. So where can manufacturers find additional time, talent, and funds to fuel innovation and deliver the highest quality products with the highest profit margins? Turns out, it’s been hiding in plain sight: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

While mission-critical to the business, ERP runs core business processes such as HR, finance and payroll. Vitally important? Of course. But strategic? Not so much. And ERP rarely helps companies launch innovative ideas and drive success. Yet, the maintenance costs of such software continue to rise each year, yielding lower ROI as ERP vendors routinely cut features and reduce the scope of services over time. Many of these same vendors continue to push upgrades and migrations, treating ERP systems like cartons of milk past their expiration date. The cost to organizations is not only monetary, but also human, constraining staffing resources that could otherwise be focused on innovation. Consequently, leadership could be missing time-sensitive opportunities in this fast-paced, fiercely competitive industry.

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Threading the savings/innovation needle

For Hubert Tsang, CIO of Pacific Textiles – a global manufacturing leader and producer of fabric used in the production of more than a billion garments each year – choosing independent software support from Rimini Street gave him a golden opportunity to achieve significant savings with a renewed focus on strategic innovation.

“When we purchased SAP, the closest product we were offered to fit our needs was the Mill Products industry solution, traditionally used for paper products and steel manufacturing,” said Mr Tsang. “Obviously, textiles didn’t fit quite well into that, so we required an extensive number of customizations.”

While vendor support for S/4HANA was helpful during initial implementation, the service deteriorated after that, and Pacific Textiles became frustrated with quality, speed, and cost issues. Pacific Textiles quickly chose Rimini Street, locking in a five-year deal to secure both the savings and long-term partnership while mapping out its strategic IT roadmap.

Making the switch to independent software support helped deliver markedly improved, higher-quality services for Pacific Textiles’ customized SAP S/4HANA systems, which serve as the backbone of the business, reducing response time by 96 percent compared to vendor support. It also freed IT staff to work on more strategic projects rather than spending time chasing tickets, upgrading systems, or carrying out self-support on its highly customized software not covered by the vendor’s scope of services.

“With the money that we’ve saved by moving to Rimini Street, Pacific Textiles is now able to work on key, strategic projects that we’ve been wanting to do for years,” said Mr Tsang. “In manufacturing, we collect and analyze tons of data so we can understand and optimize the performance of our machines. We had wanted to move to a new data lake architecture, but too much budget was wrapped up in IT support. Rimini Street helped us free up the funds to take on this important project which will support our AI innovation roadmap.”

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Look before you leap

Pacific Textiles is in good company, joining hundreds of global manufacturing leaders such as Hyundai Motor Group, Proton, Globe Union, ITE Tech, SIFLEX, and many others that have made the decision to extract more value from their existing systems and refocus freed resources to work on more innovative projects.

Under pressure to cut costs and innovate, it’s no surprise IT leaders in manufacturing and many other industries are giving serious consideration to the benefits of independent enterprise software support. But Mr Tsang reminds those seeking independent software support options that not all service providers are alike.

“We quickly discounted Rimini Street’s competitors because they don’t have the same size, scale, and capabilities across the world. In particular, they couldn’t provide us with the language support that we needed,” explained Mr Tsang. “With Rimini Street, we have a lot of confidence in them because of their strong track record of success with thousands of global companies using Oracle, SAP, Salesforce and more, resulting in 4.9 out of 5.0 client satisfaction rating for nearly two decades. That is no coincidence!”

Watch the video: Find out more about the innovative projects Pacific Textiles is funding by making the strategic move to Rimini Street.

Learn more: Discover how you can refocus manufacturing IT resources from support to innovation.