Leading food ingredients manufacturer advances strategic business initiatives and overseas expansion by optimizing support for its JD Edwards Software
LAS VEGAS, October 27, 2021 – Rimini Street, Inc. (Nasdaq: RMNI), 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 Mitsubishi Corporation Life Sciences, a food ingredients manufacturer within Mitsubishi Corporation’s Food Industry Group, has switched to Rimini Street Support for its JD Edwards applications. Switching from the vendor’s support to Rimini Street has enabled the company to dramatically reduce its maintenance costs and free up internal resources for strategic initiatives. By freeing up critical resources – time, money and personnel – Mitsubishi Corporation Life Sciences is able to begin investing in its digital transformation initiatives for the next five to 10 years and establish a foothold for further business expansion, both locally and overseas.
Optimizing Resources to Fuel Digital Transformation
Mitsubishi Corporation Life Sciences Limited is a member of the Mitsubishi Corporation Food Industry Group, which has diversified businesses in a number of market segments. It was formed in April 2019 through the merger of three companies – Mitsubishi Shoji Foodtech, MC Food Specialties and KOHJIN Life Sciences – to launch Mitsubishi Corporation Life Sciences Limited. The company is focused on a five to 10-year plan to transform its business through strategic digital initiatives, including projects to support remote working and flexible working environments, digitizing documents and moving to a paperless environment and utilizing artificial intelligence and big data technologies to support its future business needs.
As part of this reform, the company needed to find budget to begin planning and implementing these new digital initiatives. To support this company-wide initiative, IT reviewed and evaluated its JD Edward system – used for production management including work orders, material requirements planning and order management – to assess the current ROI it was receiving in exchange for the high support costs. The company wanted to continue using its current stable software version for as long as possible and did not see value in future upgrades. In addition, the company felt that the vendor was not providing adequate support for its system – they encountered frequent problems that caused critical issues in their operations but were not receiving quality support to address these issues. For Mitsubishi Corporation Life Sciences, even the slightest downtime seriously impacts its business activities such as accounting, production, sales, purchasing and inventory management. Mitsubishi Corporation Life Sciences sought an alternative approach to address these issues, which led them to Rimini Street.
“We use JD Edwards for many critical business areas such as accounting, production, sales, purchasing and inventory management, and even a momentary downtime would have a serious impact on our business activities. In the past, the vendor’s support for critical software issues that could stop our business has been unsatisfactory. As we looked for ways to both get the quality support we needed and the ability to optimize our investment in the platform, we found out about third-party maintenance support from Rimini Street,” said Shinya Hattori, chief information officer and general manager of Information Systems at Mitsubishi Corporation Life Sciences. “We made the decision to switch to Rimini Street within about six months of starting our evaluation. With the resources we have freed up as a result of this switch, we aim to invest in areas of corporate growth including overseas expansion and will work closely with Rimini Street to build our own IT roadmap for the future.”
Rapid Response and World-Class Support
As with all Rimini Street clients, Mitsubishi Corporation Life Sciences benefits from a flexible, premium-level enterprise software support model that includes industry-leading Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with guaranteed response times of 10 minutes or less for all critical (P1) issues. All clients are also assigned a Primary Support Engineer with an average of 20 years’ experience in the client’s specific enterprise software and backed by a team of functional and technical engineers.
“In the past, the software vendor often failed to quickly respond to our requests for support,” said Yohei Yoshizaki, group manager for the Information Systems Department at Mitsubishi Corporation Life Sciences. “With Rimini Street, we receive a higher quality service, more sincere responses to our inquiries and faster response times.”
“Mitsubishi Corporation Life Sciences is another example of how companies in Japan are optimizing their costs and maximizing their ERP investments to pave the way for digital transformation that help their businesses grow and thrive,” said Yorio Wakisaka, group vice president and regional general manager, Japan, Rimini Street. “By partnering with Rimini Street, they have dramatically reduced their support and maintenance costs enabling them to free up resources that can be redirected to more strategic business imperatives. We look forward to continuing to support Mitsubishi Corporation Life Sciences as they take back the control of their IT roadmap to better drive competitive advantage and growth.”