North American lighting and smart home company funds product innovation from increased operational efficiency driven by improved support for SAP. 

A U.S.-based leader in energy-efficient residential lighting products and smart home, GE Lighting, a Savant company, owns a significant share of shelf space in the North American retail market. It serves a diverse array of customers from nationwide big-box retailers to regional food and drug stores to online outlets.   

The company’s leaders believe consumers should expect more from their light sockets. This vision fuels their drive for innovation in both the traditional and smart lighting spaces. Their goal is to bring more value to retailers and consumers by bringing premium products that enhance convenience, comfort, and security for homes. For retailers, moving from traditional lighting to more innovative lighting experiences drives higher margins and customer loyalty.  

To drive their vision, the company leaders needed to rethink their support relationship with SAP. They determined that SAP support was too expensive and too limited to support their mission. SAP is a prominent part of their technology ecosystem, and they use SAP Change Request Management (ChaRM), a tightly integrated component within Solution Manager for change management.  

“Our company has been on a journey to transform ourselves from a traditional lighting company to a consumer tech and smart home company. That requires investment in every function across our company and that we ask ourselves, ‘What can we optimize in our current operations?’ so that we can create the ability to help invest in that transformation. And these discussions initially started with Rimini Street,” explained Theresa Szoke, VP of Information Technology for Savant Systems, Inc., a global leader in smart home and smart power spaces that purchased GE Lighting in 2020.  

However, the executives were apprehensive about going without SAP support completely. They had limited SAP expertise internally and both SAP Solution Manager and SAP CHaRM had been integral parts of their processes for almost a decade. If they left SAP support, they would lose access to SAP Solution Manager and SAP CHaRM — and face potential back-end system disruptions. 

Replacing ChaRM yields unexpected benefits

In their initial discussions with Rimini Street, the company leaders learned that Rimini Street had a solution for CHaRM: Rimini Watch™ for Change Management. The solution provides: 

• Complete transparency and visibility of all changes that move through the SAP environment 
• Single-pane-of-glass view to monitor transport processes with extensive reporting down to the object level 
• Central control and secure ABAP and Java transports 
• Secure transport of changes to the target systems with no downtime and the ability to develop or customize ABAP objects 
• Automated documentation that provides complete audit trails for easy tracking, including the migration of historical changes made through ChaRM for a complete audit record. 

“As a company looking to simplify and streamline our operations, we liked that Rimini Watch runs completely on the [ECC6] layer and we didn’t have another environment that we needed to manage,” Szoke said.  

“Being able to simplify the actual process of moving a change from origin to completion, for our team and our context, was helpful,” added Sanjay Sethia, Senior Manager of Enterprise Applications for GE Lighting, a Savant company.  

The company chose Rimini Street to support SAP with Rimini Watch for Change Management, and quickly realized that they had made the right choice. Rimini Support for SAP offered a higher level of engagement and far more responsiveness at half the cost, while allowing them to future-proof their SAP systems and extract more value out of their investment.  

The new change management solution kept changes moving into production and also provided an unexpected benefit: they were able to consolidate their two end-user ticketing systems down to just one. After more than 350 SAP system changes, there have been no incidents. According to Szoke, “We have established enormous confidence in leveraging our partnership with Rimini Street to solve our problems.”  

A strong and enduring partnership

This success reflected the strong relationship between GE Lighting, a Savant company and Rimini Street. “When we needed to come up with a solution to not having Solution Manager, it was in a dialogue with Rimini Street, as our partner, that we discovered Rimini Watch. Rimini Street was so consistently responsive and proactive, we no longer worried about skills gaps. They have all the bench strength that we need,” Szoke said.  

By moving away from SAP support and partnering with Rimini Street, the company was also able to free up resources and save money. They used those savings to continue to help develop innovation in the smart home space via their brand Cync™. 

Cync is a family of smart home products that includes lighting products, smart plugs, a thermostat, indoor and outdoor cameras, and much more. The entire ecosystem is controlled by a single app — The Cync App, powered by Savant. The ever-expanding line has been driving growth for the company and its retail partners. 

“Rimini Street helps us be a stronger, more responsive, more efficient IT organization for our business,” Szoke concludes. “With Rimini Street, you have a partner that is always ready with depth of expertise and a demonstrated, heartfelt commitment to helping support you,” Sethia added.