With significant cost savings and optimization of IT resources, Malaysian conglomerate reallocates people, time and money towards Digital Transformation initiatives.
Sunway Group, Malaysia’s leading conglomerate, has selected Rimini ONE, Rimini Street’s powerful combination of Rimini Support and Rimini Manage services, to improve software support and capabilities, optimize IT spending and reallocate resources towards strategic digital transformation projects.
Kevin Khoo, CIO, Sunway, said: “Rimini Street has enabled our acceleration in digital adoption journey by providing cost savings which we reinvested back into technology initiatives, has given us peace of mind with our system support needs, and confidence in our ability to explore new opportunities because we know Rimini Street will always be able to support us.”
After speaking with many Rimini Street clients and receiving “nothing short of amazing comments,” according to Khoo, he began his engagement by first selecting Rimini Support, then adding Rimini Manage following the success and value derived from the former.
Since choosing Rimini Street as their trusted IT partner, Sunway continues to benefit from:
- Direct access to a named, dedicated Primary Support Engineer (PSE) backed by the expertise and knowledge of hundreds of engineers across the globe
- Expert support and management of its software including support for customizations at no extra charge
- Guaranteed 15 additional years of stable, reliable and compliant ERP investment
- Savings of 50% on annual support fees and up to 90% on total support costs
“The cost savings from Rimini Street have given us the opportunity to invest in innovation, especially AI. Every dollar we’ve saved has been reinvested to strategic technology adoption that aligns with our key business goals,” said Khoo. “Without Rimini, a ton of our projects would still be stuck at the proposal stage. Instead, they’ve allowed us to start executing AI projects and other major tech initiatives that will be fundamental to competing and providing an excellent customer experience going forward.”
Sunway Group is one of the largest conglomerates in Malaysia incorporated in 1974. Over 50 years, its reach has grown across 13 divisions including construction, real estate, education, healthcare, hospitality, retail and finance.
Khoo has been part of the organization’s IT evolution since 2000. Under his leadership, the IT department has expanded from a team of 40 to a powerhouse of over 200, reflecting the business’ commitment to accelerating both growth and profitability goals through the power of IT.
The search for an ERP system that could handle the requirements of their construction business led Sunway Group to JD Edwards in 2000. Impressed by the ability to customize it to their various business processes, they eventually adopted the JD Edwards platform for all their business units. This pivotal move, which began with 13 separate instances, has now been streamlined to nine, optimizing the conglomerate’s operational efficiency.
“JD Edwards made it so easy for us to customize to meet our business needs. We put in our best practices into the system, and created a center of excellence that can do a lot of JD Edwards implementation customization by ourselves,” Khoo said. “But when we had to do a software upgrade, the process cost a lot, not only the dollar value, but also the downtime associated with the upgrades and the people that we have to put into the project, which includes implementation, testing and support after the upgrade.”
He added, “The people that we have doing the upgrade, we could have found better use for them. There are many digital initiatives the group would like to embrace. However, because of the resources that were stuck in the upgrade process, these projects were constantly pushed behind.” And when they went to Oracle for support, Khoo recalled, “Here we are fighting fire, and all we can do is wait. Oracle does not typically support customizations, and will begin to ask questions such as ‘Is this part of their work, or is this something that we have to address ourselves?’”
To ensure support for their JD Edwards applications and customizations, and to eliminate disruptive upgrades, Khoo selected Rimini Support for JD Edwards. With Rimini Support, Sunway Group can continue running its highly customized JD Edwards applications for at least another 15 years backed by 24x7x365 global coverage with under 2-minute response times for critical P1 issues on average.
In addition to the operational benefits, Khoo is also able to enhance talent retention. He acknowledges that there is a lot of employee turnover in the IT space. To grow and retain his team members, it was important to him to dedicate time for skills development.
“In order for us to achieve our goal of embracing AI, we needed to prepare our people with the necessary skills. By stabilizing our environment, we can give our team time to learn new technologies,” said Khoo. When introducing Rimini Street to his team, Khoo emphasized the career growth opportunity.
Khoo said: “I explained that there is a lot of opportunity for them to grow. And it has been proven already. After Rimini Street came in, our team grew even bigger. We now have even more resources focused on strategic initiatives for digital transformation.”
This experience with Rimini Street was the cornerstone of Sunway Group’s decision to become a Rimini One client, solidifying a relationship built on trust, efficiency, and shared vision.
“Not only has Rimini Street provided great service to us, but they know our environment so well because they’re already supporting us. They know our business and they know our users, so it only made sense to expand services with them,” said Khoo.
Sunway Group can now turn its gaze towards the future, focusing on AI and seamless customer experiences across all business units. “We plan to use AI to improve profitability, improve our revenue, and most importantly, improve our customer journey,” said Khoo.
