Global printed circuit board manufacturer SIFLEX, headquartered in South Korea, has switched its SAP ERP support to independent support provider Rimini Street.
The company, which is running an ECC 5.0 system, began exploring how to improve productivity and optimise its IT costs by looking at two areas – finding alternatives to free up its IT staff to focus on more strategic, growth-related projects within the business, and exploring options for reducing the cost of its SAP ERP maintenance. SIFLEX was also looking for higher quality service around support.
“There is a common predicament in Korea, where CIOs and IT leaders are tasked with the challenge to reduce overall cost across their IT landscape, and at the same time, improve efficiency, support their organisation’s growth strategy, and execute digital transformation projects,” said Tae-joon Park, manager of the Management Information Team at SIFLEX.
“SIFLEX had the same predicament and when we evaluated our entire IT cost structure to find savings opportunities, the annual spend on our SAP maintenance stood out as a large proportion of our overall IT spend, yet we were receiving subpar service, far below our expectations in return. When we spoke to Rimini Street clients, we realised that we would be in good company among other CIOs who had made the decision to switch, and who are reaping the benefits of that strategic decision – not only in terms of the cost savings, but in liberating their resources and budget to enable their digital transformation initiatives.”
One of the considerations for SIFLEX when changing its support model was having immediate access to expert engineers.
“The biggest service advantage we found moving to Rimini Street support was the fact that we could speak directly to our assigned support engineer. Previously when I would raise a support ticket with the software vendor, there was no clarity as to whom was actually handling our support request and our issues were never resolved to our satisfaction. However, with Rimini Street, their engineers collaborate with each other under the leadership of our engineer until the problem is solved,” said Park.
In addition to cutting maintenance fees by 50 per cent with its move to Rimini Street, SIFLEX can also remain on its current system for a minimum of 15 years, and was able to free up internal IT personnel to work on other initiatives within the organisation.
