FP Corporation (FPCO), the largest maker of plastic food containers and related packaging materials in Japan, has switched to Rimini Street Support for the company’s SAP ECC 6.0 applications.
By switching to Rimini Street, FPCO reduced the cost of its annual software support fees by half and deferred a costly migration to S/4HANA while the company evaluates options over time for its next-generation ERP platform.
Under Rimini Street third-party support, FPCO can run its existing SAP applications for at least 15 years from the time that it switched support providers, with no required upgrades or migrations.
In 2015, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the Tokyo Stock Exchange recognised FPCO as a “Competitive IT Strategy Company” for successfully implementing a supply chain infrastructure network across Japan, with supply chain management enterprise software at its core.
The strategy was implemented to organically connect and advance FPCO’s development capabilities, purchasing power, manufacturing capacity, distribution, recycling and information networks to ultimately improve its customer service levels.
As part of this strategy, FPCO relies heavily on its stable and mature SAP platform, which has been highly customised with many add-ons to meet its unique operational and business needs.
After SAP raised its annual maintenance fees, FPCO reassessed the value of SAP support fees and realised it could no longer justify the costs to remain supported by the vendor. FPCO then evaluated third-party support to optimise costs and maximise the ROI for its SAP environment.
“We had also considered moving to S/4HANA but could not support a reasonable business justification due to the huge cost to upgrade, the disruption to our business and the many add-ons that were developed for our customised environment that we would have to leave behind ,” said Yuuki Hashimoto, VP of IT at FPCO.
“Instead, we are investing the money we have saved from switching to Rimini Street Support into our overall IT strategy, which includes stabilising our current operations, enhancing the functionality of existing applications to improve our business operations, as well as investing in new areas of technology,” said Hashimoto.
