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.

Source: Shutterstock

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.”

Source: Shutterstock

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.

The post Manufacturers solve the puzzle to achieve both growth and profitability: Better ERP support appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Companies continue to accrue rising costs of new applications, tools, cybersecurity programs, business continuity planning, and more, while feeling the crunch of the IT talent shortage that drive higher salaries asks, attrition rates, and instability for the organization. So where are IT leaders to find wiggle room in their budget to fund innovation and meet the growing demand of the business without compromising operational excellence?

The answer is in their mission-critical ERP systems, or rather, WHO is supporting their ERP.

ERP serves as the backbone of most enterprises, offering solutions that enable the business to operate, scale and grow. However, mistaking ERP as a business strategy, not a tool, is where costs can get out of control and work against the health of the business.

Innovative companies bring forth successful ideas, new products and services that are based on the brilliant leadership and team vision, not by the ERP they purchased. Software vendors push upgrades, migrations and even forced deadlines to make companies move their systems to a newer product, each cycle adding cost, risk, disruption and downtime that impact the bottom line of the business. If executives are at the roundtable asking themselves “When do we need to make the purchase, how do we afford this,” rather than, “Why should we do this?” then it seems as though the vendor is the one running the future of the business, not the leaders.

Source: Shutterstock

Annual ERP software maintenance fees are often 22% of license fees, with diminishing ROI over time and less features and support offered, but steady in their demand of IT budget. Typically, customizations are not supported, and tax, legal and regulatory updates are only offered if on the latest release – all roads point to upgrade or migrate as a solution. This vendor-driven roadmap does not always have a clear ROI for the business.

Rimini Street offers a solution to help CXOs, IT and Finance leaders fund innovation while maximizing the ROI of its mission-critical ERP systems and enjoying better support and partnership than ever before. As the global provider of end-to-end enterprise software support, products and services that offers a comprehensive family of unified solutions to run, manage, support, customize, configure, connect, protect, monitor and optimize enterprise application, database and technology software, Rimini Street enables clients to achieve better business outcomes, significantly reduce costs and reallocate resources for innovation.

More than 5,200 Fortune 500, Fortune Global 100, midmarket, public sector and other organizations have relied on Rimini Street as their trusted enterprise software solutions provider, saving over $7B along the way. By enabling companies to run their current software release for 15 additional years, gain access to highly experienced, knowledgeable senior engineers, benefit from improved support, and partner with a global team whose interest is driven by client-success, Rimini Street continues to prove funding innovation can be easy as saying goodbye to your current vendor support provider.

Learn more and do more with Rimini Street: www.riministreet.com

The post How Successful CIOs Extract Maximum ROI of Mission-Critical ERP Systems to Fund Innovation appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.