Rinnai enhances integration and analytics with Oracle Cloud
Australian manufacturer employs Oracle’s infrastructure, integration, and analytics platforms to improve cohesiveness, resilience, and intelligence.
“We rely on Oracle to run our business. The speed and performance of Oracle Analytics Cloud empowers business users and managers who understand the data more than IT, and can factor it into their key decision-making.”
Business challenges
The subsidiary of Rinnai Japan has a 50-year history in Australia that has made it a household name for hot water and heating and cooling systems for both residential and commercial projects.
Rinnai Australia started out importing appliances from Japan, but over the last 10 years it has expanded vertically. It now operates three manufacturing facilities in Australia, and an after-sales service division called 1st Care.
As part of its expansion, Rinnai Australia acquired Brivis Climate Systems a few years ago, a move that bolstered its cooling offerings and doubled the company’s size. Today, Rinnai generates about $400 million in revenue and controls the lion’s share of the Australian heating market.
Central to Rinnai Australia’s everyday operations is an on-premises deployment of Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2, first deployed 20 years ago. This forms the backbone of the company, connecting its manufacturing, supply chain, finance, and service arms, among others.
Brivis, on the other hand, used Infor M3, a cloud-based ERP system. It was critical for Rinnai to create a single, cohesive organization that offered decision-makers end-to-end visibility. Within two years of the acquisition, Rinnai was able to decommission Infor M3 and use Oracle SOA to integrate and standardize on JD Edwards.
In the meantime, the 1st Care Division had migrated from a legacy operational application to the Salesforce Service Cloud. Once again, the SaaS application had to be integrated with the on-premises JD Edwards system. This was meant to ensure that while service requests were executed using the Salesforce platform, transaction data was stored centrally—and in real time—on the company’s ERP. As Rinnai’s leadership grew more comfortable with the cloud, the company wanted to undertake a cloud-enabled transformation.
Oracle’s Integration Cloud is key to Rinnai’s 1st Care network portal. OIC gives us peace of mind by integrating with JD Edwards to automate business processes, making sure that customers can book their service jobs with technicians experienced and qualified on all Rinnai group products.
Why Rinnai Australia Chose Oracle
Before deciding on partnering with Oracle for its cloud journey, Rinnai’s IT team considered other options, including IBM and AWS offerings.
In the end, company leaders selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for three main reasons: JD Edwards was the ERP standard at Rinnai; the company had a relationship with Oracle spanning 20-plus years; and Rinnai wanted access to a modern data platform that offered greater flexibility.
Plus, the company wanted to use Oracle Universal Credits, a next-generation subscription model that allows enterprises to use any OCI and platform services at any time, in any region. Universal Credits gave Rinnai more agility to speed up the consolidation project.
Oracle’s support also contributed to the decision. The long relationship between the two companies helped Oracle envision an architecture aligned to Rinnai’s specific needs and constraints.
Results
Since migrating JDE Edwards applications and database to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Rinnai has realized productivity, performance, and scalability benefits with better data insights. Using Oracle Data Integrator, data from multiple Rinnai systems is sent to Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, eliminating database administration by automating provisioning, securing, patching, tuning, and scaling. “We’ve run ADW for a year now and I can’t think of a single issue where we needed to restart it or needed a DBA to spend hours or days on it,” says Samir Shah, ICT business services manager.
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse feeds Oracle Analytics Cloud, which Rinnai’s finance team uses, along with Oracle Essbase, for reporting. It replaces Rinnai’s on-premises IBM Cognos TM1 analytics platform, which provided only batch-processed, PDF-style, flat reporting. Oracle Analytics Cloud gives real-time insights and empowers business users across divisions to drill down deeper and to create live dashboards by themselves, instead of relying on the IT team.
An important result of partnering with Oracle is Rinnai’s ability to stitch systems together quickly and easily. Thanks to Oracle’s integration platforms—including Oracle Integration Cloud—Rinnai was able to cut the time to complete urgent integrations from months to only weeks.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also helps Rinnai replicate production data, in near real time, from its on-premises data center to a disaster recovery setup, employing Oracle Active Data Guard. This provided redundancy and assured business leaders that if something went wrong they could switch over and keep the business running. Additionally, Rinnai can respond faster to demand by scaling seamlessly with almost no lead time, such as when it decides to integrate users from a new manufacturing facility.