Rimini Street, Inc., 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 Pulse Electronics, a leading components manufacturer for the automotive and telecommunications industries, has switched to Rimini Street support for its SAP ECC 6.0 and Business Objects software.
With the savings achieved by switching support providers, Pulse was able to divert its liberated funding to invest in business intelligence (BI) capabilities including artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enable growth and competitive advantage during a year when new spending may not have otherwise been possible. The company was also able to defer an expensive forced migration to S/4HANA, required to remain in full support with the vendor, and instead has taken complete control of its IT roadmap to support the businesses’ objectives versus the vendor’s dictated roadmap.
Budget Balancing Act – Reduce IT Operations Expense and Increase Funding for Innovation
Pulse Electronics based in San Diego, is part of Taiwanese parent company Yageo. The company designs and manufactures a wide range of components for various industries, with more than 70 percent of its products designed in collaboration with customers. Pulse uses its SAP system for several critical functions including finance, operations, supply chain and warehouse management. As its business operations are required to run 24/7, any interruption to its operations would mean a major loss of revenue. In order to sustain its leadership in a highly competitive market, the company must adapt quickly to changing market dynamics. For Pulse’s global IT director, Alan Wong, adapting quickly means having the time and resources available to pursue innovations that drive business growth and make it possible to navigate this fast-paced market.
Wong divides his IT budget into three tiers – day-to-day business operations, business growth and innovation. With a need to invest more in innovation, Wong began to investigate expenditures in the business operations tier and discovered that its SAP application support costs, including related upgrade costs and additional add-on fees, were consuming a significant portion of the IT budget. This was identified as a low-return expenditure to address as quickly as possible.
“It became evident that to sufficiently fund our innovation initiatives, including adding business intelligence capabilities, we needed to take a completely different approach and immediately release some funding from one of our budget tiers,” said Wong. “We considered moving off SAP’s support to self-support the system internally, but this was simply not practical. All of these reasons pointed us in the direction of third-party support, and we couldn’t be happier with our decision to move to Rimini Street.”
By switching to Rimini Street Support, Wong was able to free up funds from his day-to-day operations budget specifically allocated to SAP support and maintenance, and instead divert this funding to BI and AI technologies to strengthen the cognitive and intelligence capabilities of their ERP platform, including sales-related predictive analysis to derive insights that help support the businesses objectives in an increasingly competitive market.
“Macro-disruption due to the global pandemic may have slowed our progress but investing in innovation is still very much in reach thanks to switching to Rimini Street,” continued Wong.
Superior Support Capabilities with a Compelling Financial Benefit
Once Pulse made the move to Rimini Street, the organization immediately experienced a superior level of support that they had not previously experienced with the vendor. This included receiving a smooth onboarding and archiving process, support for its SAP software customizations at no additional cost, and an ultra-responsive service with highly experienced engineers.
As with all Rimini Street clients, Pulse 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, who have an average of 15 years’ experience in the client’s software system.
“We are pleased that we are able to help businesses such as Pulse Electronics reduce their costs and optimize budgets to enable them to invest those savings into innovation initiatives that aid in business growth, especially during times of economic uncertainty as we are experiencing today,” said Andrew Seow, regional general manager, Southeast Asia and Greater China, Rimini Street. “Increasingly companies across South East Asia, Greater China and around the world, are turning to Rimini Street for support of their enterprise software systems to receive a higher quality of support and reduce costs, giving them the peace of mind and resources to focus on their most pressing business initiatives.”
