Australian agribusiness Elders has chosen Rimini Street to support and maintain its SAP applications, replacing a direct arrangement with SAP’s own support function.
The new deal allows Elders to to maintain its current enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for a minimum of 15 years without risking support being cut off.
Elders, which operates over 250 branches nationwide providing products and services including livestock, real estate, insurance and other advisory services to the agriculture industry, first rolled out SAP in a private cloud environment as part of a four-year change program in 2011.
It began looking for third-party support providers to lift its application support service levels.
The new deal with Rimini Street means Elders now has an assigned primary support engineer, who is in turn backed by a team of technical engineers who are available around the clock.
The service level agreement provides for 10-minute response times for critical (priority one, or P1) issues, and 15-minute response times for P2 cases.
Elders head of IT Peveni Rajapakse said that in the short time since switching support arrangements, response times had been “excellent” when tickets were raised.
“On average, we have about 400 staff using the SAP software at any one time each and every day, so response time is critical to our operations," Rajapakse said.
Maintaining support for its current ERP setup has also given Elders some additional financial leeway.
“With the additional capacity to reinvest in IT, we can begin to look at new and interesting ways to further enhance our customer experience,” Rajapakse said.
That includes improving the end-user experience by setting digital support channels to free up time and resources for its 2000 staff, the majority of whom are located across rural Australia.
