United Biscuits Cuts SAP Maintenance Costs with Rimini Street

LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Rimini Street, Inc., the leading third-party maintenance and support provider for enterprise software, including SAP AG SAP software and Oracle Corporation's ORCL Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite, Oracle Database and Oracle Hyperion software, today announced that United Biscuits, a leading manufacturer of many of the world's most well-known branded snacks, including McVitie's biscuits and Carr's crackers, is utilizing Rimini Street Support for SAP to significantly reduce maintenance costs and improve service on its mission-critical SAP applications. United Biscuits is one of dozens of companies operating in Europe who have switched to Rimini Street third-party support to reduce its total cost of maintenance by up to 90 percent, including saving 50 percent in annual support fees, avoiding expensive forced upgrades, gaining process efficiency from an improved level of service and benefiting from support for customizations at no additional cost. As a result, they are able to use their savings to fund other vital business and IT objectives that impact their top and bottom lines.

United Biscuits: We Wanted Better Value and Support for SAP ECC 6.0

United Biscuits products are sold in more than 100 countries with core markets in the UK, Netherlands, France, Belgium and Ireland, and growing international business units from North America to the Middle East, Africa and Australia. The company relies heavily on its SAP ECC 6.0 application, the latest release from SAP, to help manage mission-critical operations, including HR, finance, treasury, payroll, plant maintenance and sales and distribution. In the last few years, a weakened global economy coupled with dynamic raw material prices motivated the company to assess the cost and value of all spend categories in its IT budget.

Upon review, United Biscuits UK IS controller Steve Airton determined that their core SAP ERP applications were mature, stable and more than able to support the business for up to a decade or longer. However, vendor annual maintenance fees for the SAP system were escalating while failing to return commensurate value for the expensive fees. United Biscuits also concluded that new innovations in the core SAP system were limited and recognized an opportunity to cut SAP support costs since major innovations were generally packaged as new modules that were not included in annual support and were required to be licensed separately.

Cost Reduction a Top Priority, but Service Excellence Key to Client's Satisfaction

In 2011, United Biscuits switched to Rimini Street, enabling the company to reduce its annual SAP maintenance spend by 50 percent and benefit from 24X7X365 premium-level service, which includes an assigned, UK-based Primary Support Engineer (PSE), support for customizations at no additional fee and support for a minimum of 10 years for existing releases without required upgrades. Additionally, Rimini Street delivers all vital UK SAP payroll tax and regulatory updates to ensure United Biscuits remains in compliance with the latest HMRC legislations.

“Our top priority when we chose Rimini Street was the cost savings, but we also wanted to improve service quality. We are now a year into the relationship and our total savings are more than we expected and the support service bears no resemblance to the service we were getting before,” said Airton. “It is truly a professional support service with fast response, clear SLAs, regular reviews, ownership and most importantly, a desire to work with us to continually improve the service we provide to the business.”

Airton added, “Prior to Rimini Street, we struggled to get any response to our support calls without escalation. Today, the process works as it should, issues are responded to within minutes and we are confident that issues will be resolved in an efficient and timely manner, allowing my team to concentrate on application development projects in and around SAP that will deliver further benefits to the business.”

Today, United Biscuits is taking advantage of their cost savings to drive improvements and innovation for their core SAP system, including several key projects scheduled in the next year. These include the implementation of several new modules in labor and recipe management, new business warehouse web reporting tools and web technologies that extend the functionality of their ECC 6.0 SAP system.

Strong Demand for Rimini Street Support in Europe

Since expanding its global support operations into Europe, demand for Rimini Street's innovative third-party support program has continued to accelerate. Dozens of organizations with operations in Europe, from manufacturing, to retail and hospitality services, have made the switch from vendor support to Rimini Street.

“We are pleased to help United Biscuits significantly reduce maintenance costs on their current SAP ECC 6.0 release, fund innovation, and achieve their overall IT goals,” said Nigel Pullan, group vice president of Europe at Rimini Street. “With strong client success and momentum, and nearly 525 customers supported in more than 70 countries, Rimini Street is committed to helping our clients around the globe drive maximum value from their existing ERP software investments now and into the future by providing up to 90-percent cost savings on their annual support without forced upgrades and more innovative, concierge-level service.”

About Rimini Street, Inc.

Rimini Street is the leading third-party provider of enterprise software support services. The company is redefining enterprise support services with an innovative, award-winning program that enables Oracle and SAP licensees to save up to 90 percent on total support costs over a decade, including saving 50 percent on annual support fees. Clients can remain on their current software release without any required upgrades or migrations for at least 10 years. Hundreds of global, Fortune 500, midmarket, and public sector organizations from virtually all industries have selected Rimini Street as their trusted, independent support provider. To learn more, please visit www.riministreet.com or call within the USA 888-870-9692 or internationally 702-839-9671.

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