Underutilized, Expensive SAP Support Hampers Innovation
A utility company with more than 2,000 employees, the MWRD serves more than 10 million customers in the greater Chicago area with residential wastewater treatment and stormwater management. Tasked with revitalizing an aging and deeply entrenched IT environment, MWRD’s director of IT set out to completely transform the organization’s IT landscape, starting with a comprehensive inventory of the company’s IT infrastructure. As part of this thorough evaluation process, it became apparent that the company was underutilizing its SAP applications by about 75%, and that their SAP support costs consumed more than a quarter of its multimillion-dollar software maintenance budget.
In addition, feedback from the internal IT team pointed to a lack of vendor support responsiveness. With these discoveries, the company initially investigated realigning SAP support to the realities of MWRD’s environment, but ultimately did not find what it needed from the vendor. Through this process, the company identified Rimini Street as an alternative provider with a proven track-record of providing quality, ultra-responsive support delivered by experienced engineers, and decided to make the switch.
“When our SAP products were originally purchased, we were way oversold, with portions of the product never even getting implemented, but we were still paying maintenance on it. After SAP announced the eventual end-of-support for our version of the application, we knew we needed to partner with a company that was willing to take the time to understand our specific issues and collaboratively figure out the optimal path forward,” said John Sudduth, director of information technology, MWRD. “We also needed a partner with a great track record of support because we had a lot of pent-up demand for support fixes that we didn’t have the skill set to complete, and it was just too expensive to contract it out to SAP. We moved all of it to Rimini Street – some of the backlog was even as old as 17 years – and have never looked back. Switching to Rimini Street Support has enabled us to free up internal resources to focus on our IT transformation initiatives.”
Rimini Street Support Helps Enable Complete IT Transformation Goal
With the immediate savings MWRD realized by switching to Rimini Street, Sudduth was able to embark on his mission-critical goal to completely transform the technology landscape and impact of IT across the organization. Sudduth re-invested a portion of the reallocated budget in a cloud-based ITSM application that formalized the design, delivery and monitoring of the organization’s complete portfolio of IT services. He created SLAs with their stakeholders to quantifiably elevate the quality of IT support. The team can now see exactly how their help desk actions impact the department’s overall performance as well as how they are being perceived as a team. As a result of this IT transformation, the IT team’s internal satisfaction scores improved from 60% to now consistently above 93%.
“We had a stale help desk environment and were able to take the significant cost savings from switching to Rimini Street support and directly invest these funds into a program of IT modernization and transformation,” continued Sudduth. “I view Rimini Street as a great partner that knows how to listen before suggesting possible solutions. Our Rimini Street account team has been phenomenal. The strides we’ve made together have helped position MWRD as a role model for the utilities industry.”
Award-Winning Support for SAP and Oracle Licensees
As with all Rimini Street clients, MWRD has an assigned Primary Support Engineer (PSE) who has an average of 15 years’ experience in SAP software and is backed by a team of functional and technical experts, available 24/7/365. Clients also receive the Company’s industry-leading service level agreements (SLAs) with a guaranteed response time of 10 minutes for critical (P1) issues. In addition, MWRD now receives guaranteed support from Rimini Street for its current SAP software releases for a minimum of 15 years without any required upgrades or migrations.
“MWRD experienced what thousands of SAP and Oracle licensees face today – a forced march to the vendor’s next release just to stay fully supported, regardless of whether or not such a significant investment has a clear ROI today, or in the future, for the organization,” said Seth A. Ravin, Rimini Street CEO. “By switching to Rimini Street Support, MWRD was able to liberate significant financial and labor resources that were used to achieve its aggressive goal of IT modernization.”
About Rimini Street, Inc.
Rimini Street, Inc. (Nasdaq: RMNI) is 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. The Company offers premium, ultra-responsive and integrated application management and support services that enable enterprise software licensees to save significant costs, free up resources for innovation and achieve better business outcomes. To date, more than 3,500 Fortune 500, Fortune Global 100, midmarket, public sector and other organizations from a broad range of industries have relied on Rimini Street as their trusted application enterprise software products and services provider. To learn more, please visit http://www.riministreet.com, follow @riministreet on Twitter and find Rimini Street on Facebook and LinkedIn.
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