Nottinghamshire County Council Renews Support Agreement with Rimini Street for its Mission-Critical SAP Applications

LAS VEGAS & LONDON-- January 22, 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 Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) has renewed its agreement with Rimini Street for Support of its SAP ECC 6.0 and SAP Business Objects software. NCC first switched to Rimini Street in 2017, achieving substantial savings in maintenance fees over the last three years, as well as related savings in avoided upgrades, process efficiencies and customization support, included at no additional charge. At a time of significant strain on public sector budgets, NCC renewed its agreement with Rimini Street to continue to achieve these essential savings as the local authority seeks to drive efficiencies in its back-office IT systems. Additionally, NCC has the reassurance that their software systems will be supported for a guaranteed minimum of 15 years from the time they switched to Rimini Street Support. This level of support gives the organization confidence its core business applications will be maintained without disruption to critical services such as payroll for employees and protection services for young children.

Delivering Essential Services While Driving Down Support Costs

Nottinghamshire County Council, located in the United Kingdom, serves a population of approximately 828,0001 with around 400 adult and child services2. Since the financial crisis in 2008, NCC has faced significant pressure to reduce expenditure across the organization. The Business Services Center (BSC) cut budgets by 56% and reduced headcount by 66% while continuing to operate its key business management systems required to deliver critical functions like payroll and paying stipends to foster carers looking after children. Despite these reductions, NCC has maintained the full range of adult and child services it is expected to run.

Due to budget cuts, the BSC adopted many digital services, including automation, to reduce the handover points between teams and minimize the number of people involved in transacting with systems. Four years ago, the Council set further ambitious targets to reduce spending within the BSC, which meant finding new ways to make savings. The BSC identified the significant fees being paid for their SAP support and maintenance as too high for the value returned, and NCC was dissatisfied with the quality of service provided by the vendor. For example, there were no Service Level Agreements (SLAs) when raising support tickets, and the team often had to chase SAP to get a response. The IT department identified third-party support to lower these high costs and selected Rimini Street’s ultra-responsive support program.

“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,” said Sarah Stevenson, group manager, Business Services Center, Nottinghamshire County Council. “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.”

Due to the support by Rimini Street’s team of experts, NCC was able to reduce and redeploy its staff dedicated to accounts payable from 20 to seven people, still achieving a 96% completion rate for paying supplier invoices - even during the COVID-19 pandemic. NCC also runs payroll for between 35,000 - 38,000 pensioners and pays its 7,000 staff, which is a complex task due to the different ways staff are paid. Rimini Street’s tax, legal and regulatory support services help ensure on-time pay awards, tax table changes, and system updates are made with minimal disruption.

NCC’s SAP applications support more than 6,000 users operating across nine county offices and numerous satellite locations, and now also thousands of home locations due to the pandemic. The Company regularly provides advice and guidance to NCC on the potential impact of changes to its core SAP applications and runs patching updates. Previously, this would cost over £100,000 per year as NCC would need to bring staff in over the weekend to complete the update and take the application offline to perform it. NCC is planning to eventually rebuild its architecture and move its SAP applications to a Microsoft Azure datacenter to ensure greater data integration between internal systems and that employees have consistent access to the same information to do their jobs more efficiently.

The Confidence of a Trusted Support Partner

NCC, as with all Rimini Street clients, benefits from the Company’s flexible, premium-level enterprise software support model, including its industry-leading SLA of 10-minute response times for all critical Priority 1 cases. Clients are also assigned a Primary Support Engineer, backed by a team of functional and technical experts with an average of 15 years’ experience in the client’s specific enterprise software system.

“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,” said Gerard Brossard, executive vice president and chief operating officer, Rimini Street. “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.”

Learn more about Nottinghamshire County Council’s success with Rimini Street.