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The move was quiet, calculated, and it\u2019s paying off.\u00a0Lotte Rental<\/a>, South Korea\u2019s dominant car rental brand with more than 300 branches and over 40 years in the mobility business, has been running one of the more instructive AI funding plays in Asia: cut legacy software costs, redeploy the savings into intelligent automation, and accelerate.<\/p>\n The company recently extended its partnership with\u00a0Rimini Street<\/a>, the third-party ERP support provider listed on Nasdaq. The expanded deal covers both Oracle and SAP systems and delivers more than 50% in annual support fee savings. The real question is what Lotte Rental is doing with that money.<\/p>\n Stability first, innovation second<\/p>\n Enterprise software maintenance is expensive and rarely optional\u2014a significant line item for any large organization running mission-critical SAP or Oracle environments.<\/p>\n Lotte Rental redirected that spend. By moving to Rimini Street, it freed up capital while also gaining something less obvious: the freedom to stop chasing upgrade cycles. Without the pressure to absorb vendor-mandated upgrades, its core systems stabilized. And in the AI era, a stable ERP foundation lets you build quickly on top of it.<\/p>\n \u201cEnsuring that our foundational enterprise systems are secure, flexible, and primed for innovation is essential to achieving our vision to lead the mobility industry,\u201d said Changgeun Park, head of IT at Lotte Rental.<\/p>\n What the savings built<\/p>\n Lotte Rental deployed robotic process automation, improved its SAP ERP interfaces, and unified marketing, logistics, finance, and HR onto a single platform. It\u2019s also investing in ESG mobility services and cloud infrastructure. The company projects these initiatives will save more than 100,000 work hours over five years.<\/p>\n This is more than a cost-cutting story. It\u2019s a capital reallocation story, with ERP savings directly converted into an AI budget.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Rimini Street, Lotte Rental has a roadmap that allows for immediate investment in AI-driven initiatives, digital transformation and operational excellence,\u201d said Kevin Kim, GVP and regional general manager at Rimini Street Korea.<\/p>\n The regional angle<\/p>\n Asia Pacific\u2019s data and AI leaders face a familiar constraint: SAP and Oracle environments that absorb a disproportionate share of IT budgets, leaving limited headroom for the AI investments that boards are now demanding. For example, Singapore\u2019s\u00a0National AI Strategy 2.0<\/a> calls for deep AI integration across industries \u2014 and enterprises that can\u2019t self-fund that transformation will feel the gap.<\/p>\n The Lotte Rental model is worth studying. Stabilize core systems, stop the upgrade treadmill, and build AI capability around a composable ERP strategy. Every dollar redirected from legacy maintenance is a dollar available for data pipelines, model deployment, or intelligent automation.<\/p>\n The company didn\u2019t wait for its vendors to hand it an innovation roadmap; it built its own.<\/p>\n