Philippine Airlines boosts Digital Transformation by switching to Rimini Street support for its Oracle Footprint to enhance operational capacities and accelerate post-pandemic recovery.
Philippine Airlines (PAL), the flagship carrier of the Philippines, has switched to Rimini Street Support for its Oracle E-Business Suite, Fusion Middleware and Database software portfolio.
The airline made a strategic decision to move to Rimini Street to help it address the challenges faced by the commercial aviation sector as a result of the global pandemic.
By turning over complete support of its Oracle footprint, the airline was able to accelerate key digital innovation projects that support the growth of its business including modernizing its cargo system, integrating its mobile and remote capabilities for more efficiencies and launching its passenger analytics for improving its Know Your Customer program.
Rimini Street is a global provider of enterprise software products and services and a leading third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software products and a Salesforce partner.
Navigating the pandemic by optimizing resources for business growth
Founded in 1941, PAL is Southeast Asia’s oldest and longest-serving airline, linking 31 domestic and 54 international destinations around the globe. Today PAL continues to prove its resilience amid the changing business environment.
With reduced air travel demand, the impact of the pandemic highlighted the critical role of technology in strengthening its internal capabilities, improving processes for cost-efficiency and implementing strategic projects that deliver value to the business that enable competitive advantage and growth.
One of the initiatives embarked on to navigate the pandemic induced crisis was to streamline its portfolio of applications to better optimize its technology investments. This prompted the exploration of third-party support which led the company to Rimini Street for a comprehensive support solution for its mission-critical Oracle software portfolio, which is used for the airline’s finance and administration, procurement and human resources functions.
Philippine Airlines’ focus is to emerge stronger than before and achieve its goal of becoming a more customer-centric airline. By optimizing technology investments, including its Oracle software, the airline was able to pivot the business quickly and channel its liberated resources towards more innovative transformation projects and technology investments that deliver value to the business such as IT modernization and business intelligence initiatives.
Wilson Go, Chief Information Officer at Philippine Airlines, said: “We needed a partner to help us optimize our resources – including time, money and IT personnel – and drive collaboration and efficiency across the company in a more cost-effective manner.
“Rimini Street was that proven partner of choice. The company’s responsive, high-quality support as well as the significant support cost savings we realized, enabled us to focus our efforts and resources on our business transformation efforts.”
Differentiated and personalized support services
As with all Rimini Street clients, Philippine Airlines is assigned a Primary Support Engineer with an average of 20 years’ experience in the client’s enterprise software and backed by a team of functional and technical engineers. Clients also benefit from Rimini Street’s award-winning service level agreements of 10-minute response times for critical Priority 1 cases and 15-minute response times for Priority 2 issues.
“The collaborative and round-the-clock global and local support we receive from Rimini Street has enabled our internal teams to address issues faster and more efficiently, thus improving the overall experience for both our employees and customers,” continued Go.
Andrew Seow, Group Vice President and Regional General Manager, Southeast Asia and Greater China, Rimini Street, said: “Rimini Street’s client-focused, expert-led support services enable organizations to extract the most value from enterprise software and applications to optimize processes, drive cost efficiencies and help achieve business growth.
“By leveraging Rimini Street’s unified software support for its Oracle system, PAL was able to reallocate its resources and liberate its IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives that can help their business navigate the current economic environment.
“PAL joins more than 4,200 organizations worldwide that have switched to Rimini Street to harness support savings that can be channeled into business innovation.”
To find out more about the project we asked Wilson Go, Chief Information Officer at Philippine Airlines, further questions to find out more.
How has your partnership with Rimini Street enabled you to streamline your portfolio of applications and better optimize your technology investments?
Our partnership with Rimini Street allowed us to realign our resources and helped enable the consolidation and modernization of applications.
How has this enabled Philippine Airlines to drive collaboration and efficiency across the company?
With the consolidation and modernization of applications, we were able to standardize and integrate, minimizing manual intervention, introduce intelligent automation into the process, driving efficiency and productivity.
What are the best features of the support Rimini Street has provided to you?
Whilst our prior support experience was mostly self-help, we truly appreciate the human touch, the hand holding. Which provides the confidence and trust in the expected support services.
How has the partnership improved the overall experience for both your employees and customers?
The immediate direct improvement in employee experience is to the IT Operations Team. Indirectly, it also ensures the improvement in customer experience, given the modernization of applications that we were able to undertake that affects our ability to serve our customers better.
The partnership has enabled you to reallocate IT resources. What are the major benefits of this?
Our imperative during this period of pandemic is ‘Do More with Less’. That’s exactly what we were able to do. Reallocate the savings in IT resources from partnering with Rimini Street to undertake our priority projects that improves operational efficiencies and customer experience.
Why did you choose to work with Rimini Street?
It’s actually quite straightforward, we strictly followed our procurement process, which compared Rimini Street against the best of breed providers in the marketplace. Rimini Street simply came up tops. It also helped that the key executives of Rimini Street were engaged from the get-go and demonstrated their commitment by following through.
