Procurement and IT executives for Brazil’s largest pharmaceutical company drive switch to third-party support to reduce SAP’s high maintenance costs and redirect savings to innovation
LAS VEGAS and SÃO PAULO, October 20, 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 Hypera Pharma, Brazil’s largest pharmaceutical company, has switched from SAP to Rimini Street Support for its highly customized SAP ECC 6.0 applications, Microsoft SQL Server Database and SAP BusinessObjects software. The company also switched from SAP’s Solution Manager to Rimini Street Watch for SAP, ensuring seamless monitoring for its SAP systems. By switching to Rimini Street Support, Hypera Pharma was able to leverage its significant support savings to fund the company’s business transformation priorities, including expanding the corporate pharmaceutical brand and funding cutting-edge pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) with Hynova, the company’s modern research center in Brazil.
Procurement Drives Innovation by Partnering with IT And Business Leaders
Based in São Paulo, Hypera Pharma produces popular medicine brands used by over 200 million Brazilians, along with vitamins, nutritional supplements and dermo cosmetics. At the end of 2017, the company announced a new corporate brand with an exclusive focus on the pharmaceutical sector, a competitive industry that demands high investments in innovation and R&D, along with increasing capacity to launch new products and medicines to its consumers more often. This new business direction sparked Hypera Pharma’s leaders to reinvent its operations, realign business priorities and seek out initiatives to drive cost optimization.
The decision to move to Rimini Street Support was spearheaded by Hypera Pharma’s heads of procurement and IT, who were tasked with optimizing resources and saw the opportunity to reduce the spending for the company’s high SAP maintenance and support costs and at the same time improve support service. They worked closely to create a business case to demonstrate to the company’s CEO that switching to third-party support would bring security, operational efficiency and savings. The company’s heads of procurement and IT determined that Hypera Pharma should not be locked into the vendor’s time-bound upgrade path to S/4HANA as it did not make sense for the business in the short term. They found little value and no ROI in making this highly disruptive move when their current customized ERP system perfectly met their business needs.
“Procurement leaders should feel empowered to bring ideas to company leaders on how their organization can be more strategic and align with business priorities. They can influence decision-makers on how IT initiatives, such as adopting third-party support, adds value and frees up resources for other important projects and innovation,” said Humberto Guimaraes, head of procurement, Hypera Pharma. “Switching to Rimini Street Support is part of a new mindset that has enabled the company to be more relevant in the pharmaceutical industry. With our support savings, we can increase investments across the business, including product R&D, digitalization, process automation and new ERP applications that modernize logistics operations and allow product traceability.”
Ultra-Responsive Support with Industry-Leading SLAs
Hypera Pharma, along with all Rimini Street clients, benefits from the Company’s flexible, premium-level enterprise software support model, including its industry-leading Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 10-minute response times for all critical Priority 1 cases. Clients are also assigned a Primary Support Engineer, backed by a team of functional and technical experts with an average of 15 years’ experience in the client’s specific enterprise software system. Hypera Pharma was using some components of SAP Solution Manager, but working with Rimini Street’s Proactive Support Services team, the company instead implemented Rimini Street Watch for SAP. The solution combines proactive diagnostics and web-based dashboards to help Hypera Pharma identify and mitigate issues before they become critical.
“Maintaining our ERP support with SAP meant staying in the comfort zone. Rimini Street showed that the change to third-party support is worthwhile. Now we have reduced our SAP maintenance and support costs, allowing those resources to be directed towards our current business goals. We no longer worry about our ERP support since switching to Rimini Street,” continued Guimaraes.
“Modern companies in the digital era like Hypera Pharma, who want to maintain a leadership position in the market, need to optimize their IT costs and find resources to invest in innovation and business transformation,” said Edenize Maron, general manager, Latin America, Rimini Street. “The company’s heads of procurement and IT spearheaded the change to third-party support to generate cost savings that contributed to the organization’s strategic business goals, including modernizing logistics and accelerating R&D to bring products to market quicker. This demonstrates how key it is that all company leaders participate in supporting growth and innovation.”