Leading Japanese manufacturer of housing equipment reduces maintenance spend, enabling future innovation plans
LAS VEGAS, April 17, 2018 – Rimini Street, Inc., (Nasdaq: RMNI), a global provider of enterprise software products and services, and the leading third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software products, today announced that Corona Corporation, a leading housing equipment provider in Japan, has switched to Rimini Street support for its Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) system. Corona immediately realized savings of 50 percent on vendor annual support fees, and with this new found savings, the company is now planning to invest in strategic areas of the business to increase efficiency and help drive innovation. For example, Corona is assessing IoT technology for advanced problem detection on its manufacturing lines, in addition to enhanced tools for transforming workflow across the organization. Corona has estimated that in ten years their total cost reduction will be approximately one billion yen, which includes the cost of version upgrades that they would have needed to undertake in order to retain full support from the vendor.
Avoids Unnecessary Upgrade, Vastly Reduces IT Spend
Corona implemented Oracle EBS in 2010, and primarily utilizes the application in a wide range of areas including management of procurement, manufacturing, supply and demand, sales, debits and credits, manufacturing costs and accounting. While on vendor support, Corona’s annual maintenance contract included an additional cost for an on-demand service in order to receive 24/7/365 support. However, Corona found this expensive, additional service to be ineffective and cost prohibitive, leading them to cancel after only two years. Corona’s vendor maintenance fees were increasing every year with each renewal, stretching the company’s budget and causing concern as the cost had reached several tens of millions of yen per year.
As Corona considered a software upgrade just to retain full vendor support, Corona analyzed the cost effectiveness of the Oracle EBS application and at the same time reviewed the range of support services. After reexamination, the company determined their Oracle EBS application was meeting all their business needs, and functions they needed to respond to revisions of the law were already implemented — Corona therefore decided to forgo any upgrades which would not add meaningful value to their business.
Once this decision had been made, the company explored alternative support solutions and ultimately selected Rimini Street to support add-on applications in addition to their Oracle EBS application. Prior to completely making the switch, Corona had concurrent agreements with Oracle and Rimini Street. After Rimini Street demonstrated faster response times and rapid proposed solutions, Corona confidently fully switched their EBS support to Rimini Street.
“There was a symbolic incident that happened last year when an error occurred in a migration tool provided by Oracle while performing the actual migration process to a new platform,” said Fumio Nakano, assistant director, IT Planning Division at Corona Corporation. “When we contacted Oracle for a workaround method there was no response for several hours, but when we contacted Rimini Street a solution was proposed in a short period of time, the problem was successfully resolved, and we were able to complete our platform migration as scheduled. We quickly realized there was a stark difference in service responsiveness between Oracle and Rimini Street. The response was fast even in subsequent inquiries and troubleshooting, and having dedicated Rimini Street engineers responding to our queries significantly reduced the workload on our company, which has enabled us to rest assured knowing we have an excellent support provider. Rimini Street’s prompt response, from their initial response to solving the issue, is extremely crucial for our company given the mission-critical nature of our EBS application.”
Enhanced Support Model
Corona has enjoyed a collaborative working environment with Rimini Street and relies heavily on its support to find where problems originate. Furthermore, Corona can now maximize their robust, stable Oracle EBS application for a guaranteed minimum of 15 additional years from the time the company switched to Rimini Street, without a required upgrade to remain on vendor support.
As with all Rimini Street clients, Corona has an assigned senior level Primary Support Engineer (PSE) with an average of 15 years’ experience. Corona also has access to local engineers 24/7/365 to address any support issues and receives Rimini Street’s industry-leading service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing a 15-minute response time for Priority 1 critical cases.
“Corona has been steadily expanding its manufacturing business for over 80 years, and is always looking at ways to be more efficient and innovative for its future growth,” said Yorio Wakisaka, general manager, North East Asia, Rimini Street. “Corona now has the cost flexibility and resources to continue planning for the future, and begin implementing new systems that improve productivity like IoT technology. Corona’s story is similar to many of our clients who are tasked with optimizing their IT spend and at the same time investing in new digital technologies for business growth and competitive advantage. With Rimini Street’s award-winning, premium support, our clients’ current core systems of record are cost-effectively supported for a guaranteed minimum of 15 additional years, liberating significant funds for their digital transformation initiatives.”