SP Electricity North West (SP ENW) keeps the lights on for more than five million people from the UK’s Lake District to the city of Manchester. As one of the region’s key power distribution operators, it maintains 57 km (about 35.42 mi) of power lines and electricity cables with the goal of developing ground-breaking solutions to deliver reliable, affordable and sustainable service to its customers.
For SP ENW, ECC 6.0 and BusinessObjects serve as the backbone for their daily operations, covering everything from HR and finance and more. Like many energy and utilities providers, heavy customizations were created to align with their specific business processes and to adhere to government regulations.
With vendor support for ECC 6.0 and other core platforms soon sunsetting, regional providers like SP ENW face increasing pressure. They cannot afford to sacrifice day-to-day operations while allocating resources to the looming disruption of their mission-critical systems. This makes it critical that businesses understand that alternatives to support exist that will allow them to keep the lights on, run without disruption and move toward innovation on their own terms.
Deep SAP expertise sparks stability
In 2022, SP ENW engaged an L2 support provider to oversee the day-to-day management of their SAP systems. However, they quickly realized that the level of expertise needed was much more than what the provider could deliver.
After experiencing 10 outages in a few months, with each reboot taking up to 90 minutes, the support provider told them it would be impossible to fix the issue. The team was not convinced and decided to explore new options.
Upon selecting Rimini Street as their L4 support partner, the Rimini Support™ for SAP engineers stepped in and investigated the issue, found the root cause related to document handling and corrected it. After enduring months of disruption with their previous provider, SP ENW finally achieved system stability. “There was a lot of praise from our senior management for Rimini Street helping to ultimately resolve that issue,” Mark Ingleby, IT Supplier Relationship Manager at SP ENW, said.
In unique cases like this, highly skilled engineers apply the Rimini Support™ for SAP model to combine deep product expertise with cross-functional analysis. This process allows them to investigate beyond surface-level symptoms and identify underlying causes that other providers often overlook. This delivers targeted and lasting fixes tailored to each client’s environment.
“With the customizations and adaptations that we’ve done to our system, we needed someone with more experience to understand how changes impact all these areas, and that’s what Rimini Street does for us,” said Martin Williams, Problem & Knowledge Manager at SP ENW.
Where others say no, Rimini Street says YES
On the heels of that success, SP ENW brought another critical issue that the L2 provider said couldn’t be solved to Rimini Street’s attention. Williams, responsible for reducing incident volumes through effective problem management, saw an opportunity; if the company could remove the flood of SAP password reset tickets with a Single-Sign-On (SSO) solution, their analysts would have the bandwidth to identify broader incident patterns. “The other vendor said SSO wasn’t technically possible, but they also said they couldn’t fix our servers, which Rimini Street managed to do,” Ingleby said.
The service desk was being bombarded with up to 200 password reset requests per month, and according to Ingleby, operational efficiency was impacted. “Although they may only be 10-minute calls, they averaged out to up to 20 minutes of on-call work plus logging time. Over the course of years, it accounted for hundreds of thousands of British pounds in overhead costs.” In addition to operational impacts, users avoided the system because of the password complications.
Enabling SSO would require specialized engineering expertise to accommodate the power provider’s customized SAP environment. After a competitive bidding process, Rimini Consult™ came out as the best fit solution to complete the project based on both expertise and value. The proposed solution eliminated the need for SP ENW to invest in a costly, dedicated SSO product, maximizing the value of their existing SAP estate and saving an unnecessary IT expenditure.
The result? Seamless one-click access to SAP applications and an enhanced user experience. With SSO, employees could now access all their SAP applications with a single click, no longer delayed by forgotten passwords. For SP ENW’s 2000+ employees, this meant smoother workflows and fewer frustrations.
Lighting the way to real business value
Password reset tickets once accounted for 10% of the tickets in their service desk queue. After the SSO implementation, the number of password reset tickets was reduced by 99%.
On top of the quantitative benefits, the service desk is now able to deliver more value to users. Analysts who once spent hours resetting passwords were now freed to focus on higher-value problem-solving. It also gave staff room to grow professionally, engaging with more complex technical challenges rather than repetitive tasks. “It’s improving our service desk representatives because now they have more time to spend with users and investigate complex issues rather than being time-pressured with password incidents,” Williams said.
The SSO implementation also improved the quality of incident analysis, enabling SP ENW to identify patterns faster. Williams explained, “Now, when I’m looking at the incidents, it’s easier to spot trends without 1000s of password reset tickets in the way. It’s like getting rid of some of the trees that are stopping me from seeing the woods.”
These gains reflect how Rimini Street’s process often goes beyond break and fix support to help organizations optimize how their systems are used day to day, turning technical stability into practical business improvements moving into the next era of tech.
Charging ahead with confidence
SP ENW runs an internal scorecard for their vendors based on stringent criteria. Based on Ingleby’s analysis, “Rimini Street has outscored our baseline. There are only two other vendors that have ever done that since I’ve been calculating the scores.” A cornerstone of the Rimini Street approach and the successes with SP ENW is a focus on root cause analysis. This methodology goes beyond just closing tickets; it means digging deeper to understand what caused the issue and fixing it so that it doesn’t repeat. Paired with the expertise of senior-level engineers, SP ENW was able to turn “can’t be done” projects into business realities.
While many IT departments struggle with being labeled the “Department of No” due to resource constraints or knowledge gaps, with Rimini Street, SP ENW is empowered with the resources and deep expertise to say “yes” to improvements across productivity, profitability and user experience.
As they plot their SAP roadmap through 2032, the SP ENW IT team feels strong in their outlook, knowing they are backed by a capable support partner with unmatched support, optimization and innovation capabilities, which in turn generates confidence from the organization in their ability to deliver transformation without disruption.
SP Electricity North West’s journey with Rimini Street demonstrates how energy and utility providers, many running on thin margins and balancing strict compliance and regulations, can avoid unnecessary upgrades and continue running and optimizing their mission-critical SAP platforms well into the future. Most importantly, they can reallocate resources to accelerate growth and profitability goals.
As part of their ‘Innovate Pillar,’ Rimini Street turns focus from fixing problems to planning for the future by identifying opportunities to modernize selectively, adopt new technologies at the right pace and ensure systems remain in fighting form for years to come. This forward-looking pillar allows organizations like SP ENW to strengthen today’s operations while freeing up budgets and resources for future success.
“Instead of spending cycles on accessibility issues, our team is now focusing their efforts on value-add projects that deliver real ROI for our business,” Ingleby said.
Our solutions for SP Electricity North West
Receive comprehensive enterprise software support from a proven provider. Whether you need issue resolution, performance tuning or regulatory compliance, you can trust Rimini Support™ to deliver.
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- Support for customizations not covered by the vendor
- The strength and knowledge of hundreds of seasoned engineers on your team, but not on your payroll
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