This manufacturer is a global leader in fluid filtration, separation, and purification, and manufactures products for microelectronics production, breweries and more. 

The Global Manufacturer Challenge 

A long-time SAP customer, the manufacturer currently runs SAP ERP (ECC 6.0) with Enhancement Pack 7, SAP Business Warehouse 7 and other SAP applications and technologies on the IBM Db2 platform. To compete in such a varied global marketplace, the company’s challenge was twofold: first, the company needed to reduce its operational spending to maximize profitability, and second, the company needed to redefine its next-generation ERP strategy to better support its business initiatives. 

“What we found, first and foremost, as we evaluated the different tools and capabilities from SAP, is that we weren’t realizing value for our maintenance dollars for ERP or our Db2 database,” says the company’s CIO. “SAP didn’t appear to be investing any further in the core ECC product and everything seemed to be invested in their cloud services, including S/4HANA.” 

In addition, the company’s CIO says SAP’s support services for the company’s ECC 

6.0 application were lacking. “We didn’t have premier-level maintenance services so we weren’t a MaxAttention customer — if we wanted to get better service from SAP, it seemed clear that we would need to pay a higher maintenance fee, which made no sense to anybody in our organization,” the CIO explains. 

As the company actively planned its SAP strategy, S/4HANA initially appeared to be the next logical step. However, the CIO notes, “When we talked to SAP about S/4HANA, it was too expensive with an unclear roadmap — we just weren’t able to jointly develop a business case to justify going to in-memory processing with HANA.” 

The Rimini Street Solution 

“With S/4HANA not a near-term viable option, we still needed to address the cost of support and maintenance through SAP as part of our strategy to reduce IT operational expenses,” the CIO says. “While we have been happy with SAP’s software offerings, including Cloud for Customer (C4C) and Success Factors, premium support service was the missing piece, and that’s where Rimini Street came into the fray.” 

“The outside referrals for Rimini Street were all good, but it was our visit with the team that convinced us that we were on the right path,” the CIO recalls. “When I took my team there, we were very prepared with questions and we uncovered everything we had come in looking to learn. Rimini Street did a great job of bringing their experts to the table, and we saw their culture firsthand.” 

In 2015, as it began planning an upgrade from SAP EhP 3 to EhP 7, the company decided to make the switch to third-party support. 

“By moving to Rimini Street, we saw an opportunity to save on maintenance, get a higher level of support and still reinvest our savings in new solutions without increasing our operational spend,” the CIO explains. “At the same time, we stopped looking to SAP for every answer and realized that our best path forward was to maintain our ECC core and add cloud applications around it. Innovating around SAP was the most viable, cost-effective strategy.” 

Client Results 

Shortly after moving to third-party support, the company prepared to upgrade to EhP 7. “As we neared our cutover date, we consulted with Rimini Street on the different upgrade scenarios,” the CIO says. “We did several mock runs and, each time we ran into an issue, we collaborated with Rimini Street to evaluate and troubleshoot.”

The upgrade went well. “We executed it faster than we expected and gave the system back to the business earlier than planned. Once in production, we ran into about a dozen incidents, all of which were resolved jointly with our Rimini Street Primary Support Engineer (PSE),” the CIO recalls. 

More importantly, the shift to third-party support funded the addition of new SaaS and cloud applications to the periphery of its core ECC 6.0 system as part of its hybrid IT strategy. 

The company has implemented SAP Cloud for Customer, SuccessFactors, and Marketo for lead management. In addition, the company has been evaluating other software offerings to innovate around its SAP ERP, including product information management solutions and eCommerce from both SAP and Intershop, and most recently revamped its website content management system. 

“Our strategy is to do more project work that drives value for the business,” the CIO says. “Having Rimini Street for support enables us to focus on where we want to go and what we want to do.”