Sunway Group is one of the largest conglomerates in Malaysia incorporated in 1974. Over 50 years, its reach has grown across 13 divisions including construction, real estate, education, healthcare, hospitality, retail, and finance.

The conglomerate’s success is driven by an unwavering commitment to integrity, humility, and excellence with a focus on sustainable development.

Kevin Khoo, CIO at Sunway Group, has been part of the organization’s IT evolution since 2000. Under his leadership, the IT department has expanded from a team of 40 to a powerhouse of over 200, reflecting the business’ commitment to accelerating both growth and profitability goals through the power of IT.

Sunway Leans into Customization of JDE to Meet its Customized Needs

The search for an ERP system that could handle the requirements of their construction business led Sunway Group to JD Edwards in 2000. Impressed by the ability to customize it to their various business processes, they eventually adopted the JD Edwards platform for all their business units. This pivotal move, which began with 13 separate instances, has now been streamlined to nine, optimizing the conglomerate’s operational efficiency.

“JD Edwards made it so easy for us to customize to meet our business needs. We put in our best practices into the system, and created a center of excellence that can do a lot of JD Edwards implementation customization by ourselves,” Khoo said. “But when we had to do a software upgrade, the process cost a lot, not only the dollar value, but also the downtime associated with the upgrades and the people that we have to put into the project, which includes implementation, testing and support after the upgrade.”

He added, “The people that we have doing the upgrade, we could have found better use for them. There are many digital initiatives the group would like to embrace. However, because of the resources that were stuck in the upgrade process, these projects were constantly pushed behind.” And when they went to Oracle for support, Khoo recalled, “Here we are fighting fire, and all we can do is wait. Oracle does not typically support customizations, and will begin to ask questions such as ‘Is this part of their work, or is this something that we have to address ourselves?’”

To ensure support for their JD Edwards applications and customizations, and to eliminate disruptive upgrades, Khoo selected Rimini Support^™ for JD Edwards. With Rimini Support, Sunway Group can continue running its highly customized JD Edwards applications for at least another 15 years backed by 24x7x365 global coverage with under 2-minute response times for critical P1 issues on average.

Expanding Partnership Fosters Talent Retention and Innovation

In addition to the operational benefits, Khoo is also able to enhance talent retention. He acknowledges that there is a lot of employee turnover in the IT space. To grow and retain his team members, it was important to him to dedicate time for skills development. “In order for us to achieve our goal of embracing AI, we needed to prepare our people with the necessary skills. By stabilizing our environment, we can give our team time to learn new technologies,” said Khoo. When introducing Rimini Street to his team, Khoo emphasized the career growth opportunity, “I explained that there is a lot of opportunity for them to grow. And it has been proven already. After Rimini Street came in, our team grew even bigger. We now have even more resources focused on strategic initiatives for digital transformation.”

This experience with Rimini Street was the cornerstone of Sunway Group’s decision to become a Rimini One^™ client, solidifying a relationship built on trust, efficiency, and shared vision. Rimini One provides a powerful combination of Rimini Support and Rimini Manage^™ services, all at a competitive, predictable, fixed and optimized cost. “Not only has Rimini Street provided great service to us, but they know our environment so well because they’re already supporting us. They know our business and they know our users, so it only made sense to expand services with them,” said Khoo.

Under Rimini ONE, Sunway Group reduces vendor management and improves overall operational efficiency with one trusted provider. This allows them to optimize their IT ecosystem while empowering the IT team to focus on ways to fold AI and other technologies into a unified customer journey.

Watch: Sunway's IT team on the value of the Rimini Street partnership.

Unified Services Pave the Way for Unified Customer Experiences

Sunway Group can now turn its gaze towards the future, focusing on AI and seamless customer experiences across all business units. “We plan to use AI to improve profitability, improve our revenue, and most importantly, improve our customer journey,” said Khoo. Because Sunway Group is so diversified, each customer that comes across Sunway Group – from a mall, hotel, or theme park – could have very different experiences. Khoo continued, “We want a seamless customer experience across all our business units. AI can help us learn more about our customers and how they engage with us.”

The dramatic cost savings from the partnership have been fully reinvested to fuel a variety of digital transformation projects. Rimini Street has not only enabled Sunway Group to optimize its IT ecosystem but to also eliminate the need for after-hours support and empower its team for strategic innovation. With its systems stabilized, Sunway Group has the freedom to carefully evaluate their ERP strategy to ensure that it aligns with their unique business requirements without engaging in unneeded upgrades.

“Without Rimini Street, a ton of our projects would still be stuck at the proposal stage. Instead, they’ve allowed us to start executing AI projects and other major tech initiatives that will be fundamental to competing and providing an excellent customer experience going forward,” Khoo said.

According to Khoo, “Rimini Street has enabled our acceleration in digital adoption journey by providing cost savings which we reinvested back into technology initiatives, has given us peace of mind with our system support needs, and confidence in our ability to explore new opportunities because we know Rimini Street will always be able to support us.” Sunway’s journey showcases how a large enterprise can both improve its operational efficiency and pave the way for continuous growth and innovation, all while nurturing and retaining its most valuable asset: its people.