Japan’s largest manufacturer of disposable food containers defers costly move to S/4HANA and maximizes ROI from existing SAP releases
LAS VEGAS, August 31, 2020 – Rimini Street, Inc. (Nasdaq: RMNI), a global provider of enterprise software products and services, the leading third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software products and a Salesforce partner, today announced that FP Corporation (FPCO), the largest maker of plastic food containers and related packaging materials in Japan, has switched to Rimini Street Support for the company’s SAP ECC 6.0 applications. By switching to Rimini Street, FPCO reduced the cost of its annual software support fees by 50% and deferred a costly migration to S/4HANA while the company evaluates options over time for its next-generation ERP platform. Under Rimini Street third-party support, FPCO can run its existing SAP applications for at least 15 years from the time that it switched support providers, with no required upgrades or migrations.
Recognized Market Leader Relies on Customized ERP at Core of Technological Innovations
Established in 1962, FPCO focuses on utilizing technology to maintain its leadership position in the manufacturing and marketing of disposable food containers in Japan. In 2015, the company was recognized as a “Competitive IT Strategy Company” by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the Tokyo Stock Exchange for successfully implementing a supply chain infrastructure network across Japan, with supply chain management enterprise software at its core. The strategy was implemented to organically connect and advance FPCO’s development capabilities, purchasing power, manufacturing capacity, distribution, recycling and information networks to ultimately improve its customer service levels. As part of this strategy, FPCO relies heavily on its stable and mature SAP platform, which has been highly customized with many add-ons to meet its unique operational and business needs. After SAP raised its annual maintenance fees, FPCO reassessed the value of SAP support fees and realized it could no longer justify the costs to remain supported by the vendor. FPCO then evaluated third-party support to optimize costs and maximize the ROI for its SAP environment.
“A few years ago, our SAP maintenance fees went up. This heightened the concern around our maintenance spend and when we assessed the value of our spend, the maintenance increase made the return on investment even less attractive internally,” said Yuuki Hashimoto, vice president of IT at FP Corporation. “We had also considered moving to S/4HANA but could not support a reasonable business justification due to the huge cost to upgrade, the disruption to our business and the many add-ons that were developed for our customized environment that we would have to leave behind.”
“Instead, we are investing the money we have saved from switching to Rimini Street Support into our overall IT strategy, which includes stabilizing our current operations, enhancing the functionality of existing applications to improve our business operations, as well as investing in new areas of technology,” continued Hashimoto.
A Partner for High-Quality, Premium-Level Support in Japan
Based on the actual service experience of of Rimini Street clients, FPCO’s due diligence and evaluation revealed Rimini Street’s business model to provide the high-quality partnership it required to support its mission-critical SAP system. As with all Rimini Street clients, FPCO is assigned a Primary Support Engineer (PSE), backed by a team of functional and technical engineers available 24/7/365, who have an average of 15 years’ experience in the client’s enterprise software applications. Clients also receive the Company’s industry-leading service level agreements (SLAs) with a guaranteed response time of 10 minutes for critical (P1) issues.
“Like many other SAP licensees, FPCO could see no justification to migrate to S/4HANA at this time. By switching to Rimini Street Support, FPCO was able to increase and maximize the ROI from its existing SAP system, and the company can now take its time to develop an ERP strategy and roadmap for the future that is driven by the business’ needs instead of the vendor’s,” said Yorio Wakisaka, regional general manager, Japan, Rimini Street. “We will continue to support FPCO and help it optimize annual IT costs, which will enable it to further improve its service levels with a robust supply chain management (SCM) system at its core.”