Global leader in imaging products consolidates operations and improves efficiency

Company overview

Epson is a global leader in imaging products including printers, projectors and LCDs. Its innovative and creative culture extends through a network of 81,000 employees in 115 companies globally. The company has annual sales of $9.5 billion.

Business challenges

Epson sought to speed up key processes and integrate disparate applications, systems and technologies within its SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) framework.

With 14,000 event-driven processes running every day, Epson needed to identify redundant processes and manage the process interdependencies between SAP applications. The sheer volume and frequency of processes required two on-site SAP Basis specialists performing time-consuming manual tasks. In addition, the company needed a solution that wouldn’t disrupt everyday operations.

Solution

Previously, Epson automated and managed their business processes with Redwood’s on-premises workload automation solution. With RunMyJobs by Redwood, they seamlessly migrated to the cloud, ensuring they have full flexibility and control — even during peak load times.

RunMyJobs now automates and manages Epson’s critical business processes. The solution orchestrates processes and data across all on-premises, cloud and containerized environments, seamlessly coordinating and integrating legacy applications, data, OS activity and web API interactions with any system, application or technology in on-prem and cloud or SaaS environments. This enables migration to cloud based applications with few changes to business processes.

RunMyJobs’ event-driven capabilities enable Epson to trigger tasks in near-real-time, when they meet specified criteria and from anywhere in the SAP environment.

Results

Since implementing Redwood, Epson saves 10.5 working days every quarter — time it can dedicate to other projects.

Epson’s SAP Basis operations team now focuses on system monitoring and management rather than daily administration.

“Redwood allowed us to identify the jobs that needed to run, who owned them, as well as define escalation procedures with specific dependencies,” says Hans Jansen, Senior SAP Basis Specialist.

A key factor in Epson selecting RunMyJobs was a business value assessment developed with Redwood’s pre-sales team, which provided valuable ROI data to executive management. With that assessment and adoption of the solution, Epson is gaining greater value from its investment in SAP technology and has achieved considerable cost savings.

Epson now proactively manages processes in parallel instead of sequentially. Epson was also able to share workloads across its SAP application servers, which reduced processing time from 14 hours to eight. These changes optimized the application infrastructure and improved the end-user experience.