Rimini Street Inc., a global provider of enterprise software products and services, has announced that T-Mobile, a network provider in the United States, continues leveraging Rimini Street Support to maximize the return on its SAP enterprise software investments since making the switch to mission-critical, 24/7/365 Rimini Street Support in 2018.

T-Mobile’s SAP platform is comprised of more than 200 SAP modules, is used as the system of record for key financial and operational functions and is a critical component of T-Mobile’s supply chain portfolio, a vital part of the company’s customer experience. Since making the switch from vendor support to Rimini Street, T-Mobile has been able to redirect budget and resources to focus on delivering services and technology aimed at creating competitive differentiation by delighting its customers, rather than wastefully allocating resources to maintaining and managing its SAP infrastructure.

In addition to providing wireless voice and data services, T-Mobile is also a retailer that sells a variety of phones and devices through retail outlets and is one of the largest and fastest-growing mobile-first banking platforms in the US.

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T-Mobile’s supply chain, which relies on its SAP platform for key operational and financial functions, is foundational to supporting critical aspects of its customers’ journey.

“Most companies ignore the inherent power of their supply chain,” said Erik LaValle, senior director of product and technology for supply chain at T-Mobile. “At T-Mobile, it is a vital part of the customer experience and enables us to deliver on our brand promise. It’s how the commitment to our customers — delivering what they want, when they want and where they want it — really comes to life.”

Mission-critical SAP

T-Mobile regularly reviews its vendor portfolio to assess the quality of service and value delivered by its technology vendors. As part of a review of each of its technology providers, the company determined the quality of service they were getting from SAP for support of their mission-critical SAP system, along with the advancement of the technology versus the costs they were paying on an annual basis, were deemed to deliver little ROI or value.

While happy with their SAP system, too much time, money and internal resources were required to support and update the system. In addition, the company had no interest in migrating to a completely new platform, SAP S/4HANA, just to stay fully supported by the vendor, and wanted to continue to leverage its highly customized system that was meeting its current business needs and expected to meet its needs years into the future, as well as mitigate risk and business disruption in preparation for its merger with Sprint, another large telecom.

“T-Mobile is a very complex environment. When we looked at the service we were getting from SAP versus the value and new functionality offered, it came down to whether or not we were getting a fair exchange from the vendor for support of our mature, highly functional platform,” LaValle said. “We estimated that SAP only covered about 20%-30% of our support issues due to our customizations, which meant the cost of each support ticket raised was in the tens of thousands of dollars.”

Switching to Rimini Street enabled T-Mobile to extend the life of their SAP investment and redeploy internal IT resources and annual savings to other more strategic customer experience initiatives.