Nottingham County Council (NCC) has renewed its agreement with Rimini Street for the support SAP applications. Rimini Street will continue to provide the service for SAP ECC 6.0 and SAP Business Objects software. Rimini Street first won the contract in 2017 and has delivered the cost savings first envisaged. The NCC Business Services Center (BSC) cut budgets by 56% and reduced headcount by 66% but has managed to continue running the essential adult and child services as well as employee payroll without disruption.
Those cost savings were made due to the high costs for SAP support and maintenance, provided at the time through CGI according to a freedom of information request. The support agreement for SAP also lacked SLAs on service calls and support tickets. This meant that BSC often had to chase calls to get a response. It led it to Rimini Street and its 10 minute guaranteed response times for all Priority One tickets. Rimini Street also offered substantial cost savings.
One satisfied customer
There seems no sign that NCC is looking to replace the software yet. With Rimini Street guaranteeing a minimum of 15 years support, NCC has until 2042 to make any changes.
Sarah Stevenson, group manager, Business Services Centre, Nottinghamshire County Council said: “Rimini Street has been an incredibly reliable and trusted partner and has given us the confidence that our core SAP applications are stable so we can now concentrate on supporting our frontline colleagues.
“There is significant pressure to drive cost reductions in our budget, but at the same time continue to maintain all our essential services and find ways to innovate. Rimini Street understands the importance of quality customer service, which not only delivers significant savings but gives us more time to plan for the future without the pressure of needing to follow a vendor-led upgrade path.”
Cheaper does not mean stagnant
Rimini Street support does not mean that the emphasis is on pure cost-cutting and a higher quality support service. NCC has continued to apply software updates to its systems. With these tasks outsourced to Rimini Street further savings of £100,000 have been made.
The disruption to the organisation is also less. Change is also in the air as the NCC plans to migrate their SAP applications to a Microsoft Azure data centre. This will enable better integration between NCC applications and reduce the risk of system failure by using the market-leading cloud vendor. Employees will also have better access to information once it is hosted in the cloud. There is no indication that NCC will move away from SAP applications, though.
Rimini Street has also continued to help NCC make further savings without impacting service levels. An example of this is the work to support the NCC accounts payable department. NCC reduces its team from twenty to seven people while maintaining a 96% completion rate for paying suppliers. This was maintained even during the COVID lockdown period.
Rimini Street also provides the required tax and legal changes to ensure that NCC runs its complex payroll accurately and on time for up to 38,000 pensioners and 7,000 staff. Councils often have complex remuneration with different pay structure types across the employee base. Rimini Street has helped maintain them all.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Rimini Street often promotes the substantial savings a company can make when first switching from Oracle or SAP support. Those savings are up to 90%. Proof that they can deliver on the savings while offering a better support service is far more powerful. That NCC has renewed its agreement shows that Rimini Street has a satisfied customer. NCC appear very happy with the savings achieved and the support it receives.
Gerard Brossard, executive vice president and chief operating officer, Rimini Street commented: “NCC demonstrates that public sector organizations facing demands to cut costs and deliver essential services can turn to third-party support as a way to minimize disruption and redirect funds.
“We have been able to show NCC that moving to cloud SaaS applications is not the only route available to public sector organizations as they plan their future IT strategies. Rimini Street’s business is support, and our only role is to help our customers ensure their stable, mission-critical systems perform to the highest levels of reliability and availability.”
