When Kevin Grayling stepped into the CIO function at sugar cane firm Florida Crystals in 2017, he felt he was inheriting beginning place.
“My predecessor, the CIO Don Whittington, who had been with the corporate for about 17 years in that function, had actually developed a really trendy enterprise course of know-how panorama with SAP,” he mentioned.
Grayling got here to Florida Crystals from Kraft Meals/Mondelēz, and quite a lot of his expertise translated. Each corporations have manufacturing and shopper packaged items operations. However Florida Crystals additionally has an agriculture component to its enterprise; it grows sugar cane that it makes into uncooked sugar. “The strategic pondering and the way you automate or digitize processes in that house, that was a studying curve,” he mentioned.
Grayling has definitely gotten in control. Throughout his tenure on the firm, he has been concerned in additional than 20 digital transformation initiatives. He gave InformationWeek an inside have a look at a few of these initiatives and talked in regards to the subsequent steps for sustaining Florida Crystals’ custom as an early adopter of know-how.
Kevin Graling, CIO, Florida Crystals
The tech behind the sugar
Florida Crystals, based in 1960, is a world firm with markets within the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Belize, Portugal, Italy, the UK, and the Caribbean. It farms on hundreds of acres and operates 4 sugar mills, 10 sugar refineries, 12 non-refinery services, and 4 renewable vitality services, together with enterprise workplaces and R&D services.
It has a provide chain logistics and multimodal transportation community for delivery the sugar it produces and buys for patrons in industrial and grocery channels. Florida Crystals and ASR Group, which it owns, have an annual refining capability of between 6 million to 7 million metric tons of sugar. It makes use of E2open provide chain software program to handle its allocation of products and benchmark its freight charges.
Whereas the corporate makes and strikes hundreds of thousands of tons of sugar, Grayling described the corporate’s enterprise structure as comparatively easy. The corporate’s earlier mannequin was 50% to 60% SaaS. Below Grayling’s management, that share shifted to 80% to 90%. He mentioned he works collaboratively with the corporate’s agriculture, manufacturing and refining, and model groups to make sure IT aligns operationally and strategically throughout operations.
The corporate leans into tech to drive its operations. It leverages quite a lot of precision agriculture applied sciences to automate planning and executing its farming. It has a historical past of progressive partnership with SAP. “We put SAP within the cloud in 2009, 2010 with our associate Virtustream,” Grayling mentioned. “We have been the primary firm on the planet to implement SAP HANA. We have been the primary firm on the planet to implement SAP S/4HANA.”
He mentioned he considers Florida Crystals extra technologically superior than different sugar corporations, in addition to many different meals and beverage corporations. He famous that when he joined Florida Crystals, it was not scuffling with a number of the challenges different comparable enterprises confronted on the time, reminiscent of transferring to the cloud and ECC to S/4 upgrades.
“I might undoubtedly go toe-to-toe with my friends within the business about the place we’re on that journey versus the place they’re, and what benefit that provides us for the subsequent few years,” Grayling mentioned.
Driving digital transformation
Florida Crystals’ willingness to put money into technological transformation is a part of what attracted Grayling to the corporate eight years in the past. Throughout his tenure, he has labored to construct on the corporate’s tech-forward strategy. From 2018 to 2022, he and his workforce targeted on shifting operations throughout the corporate — together with the provision chain, HR, finance, gross sales and customer support — to digital workflows.
The corporate ran SAP in an on-premises atmosphere, in a digital personal cloud and on a number of cloud platforms. In 2022, Florida Crystals accomplished the migration of SAP into AWS with managed service supplier Lemongrass. That migration allowed the corporate to retire quite a lot of infrastructure providers that match round SAP, based on Grayling.
Florida Crystals made two main digital transformation shifts proper earlier than the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, each of which helped it higher handle the disruption of that world occasion.
Whereas sugar can’t be made remotely, the corporate’s roughly 3,500 workplace employees would want to shift to a distant work mannequin. Florida Crystals completed a significant telecommunications overhaul, shifting away from a bodily, PBX-driven voice calling community to Groups. Not solely did the corporate’s telecom bills drop by 78%, it was additionally higher ready for the calls for of shifting.
The corporate additionally applied a brand new source-to-pay system — SAP’s Ariba — within the U.S. and Canada previous to the onset of the pandemic. That shift meant the corporate was capable of handle invoices, buy order creation and make digital funds.
Embracing course of intelligence and AI
Integrating course of intelligence has been a core a part of the corporate’s journey. In late 2021, Florida Crystals started to work with the Celonis platform to higher perceive and enhance its enterprise processes.
Over the previous few years, Florida Crystals has used the Celonis platform in its finance, procurement and inbound provide chain operations.
“We applied dashboards for accounts payable so they might see missed provider reductions, doubtlessly duplicate invoices,” Grayling shared for instance. He and his workforce honed these fashions a number of occasions, reaching extra accuracy with every iteration.
The platform’s automation eradicated a big quantity of handbook work inside its numerous use instances.
“The dashboard is basically presenting to you in a really easy-to-access, apparent method what must be performed. And it permits the individuals working in that workforce to deal with doing that moderately than determining what must be performed,” Grayling mentioned.
It has additionally streamlined onboarding new workforce members. “It is simpler to get them in control and competent in that course of than it may need been doing it within the extra handbook method,” Grayling mentioned.
Florida Crystals continues to deepen its relationship with Celonis. The corporate is exploring as much as 30 further use instances throughout customer support, finance, HR and different areas. Celonis will probably be integral to the corporate’s AI technique.
“We’ll begin to get actually into not simply the automation that the Celonis platform has given us and the machine studying that we have used up to now in that platform, however [it] will get us into true agentic AI,” Grayling mentioned.
Working with an virtually solely SaaS ecosystem, Florida Crystals doesn’t develop a lot software program internally. Slightly, Grayling and his workforce look to make use of what’s native to the platforms the corporate makes use of. It’s going to additionally look to leverage AI embedded in its strategic companions, reminiscent of Microsoft and SAP.
“They [Celonis] actually perceive the SAP enterprise course of hierarchy,” Grayling mentioned. “They actually perceive SAP knowledge fashions. They’ve supplied an amazing platform to automate and visualize inside SAP.”
By way of its partnership with Microsoft, the corporate is trying to create brokers throughout the Copilot Studio platform, based on Grayling. Florida Crystals has additionally labored with C3 AI to develop bespoke AI initiatives in mill optimization and harvest planning.
Tech transformation might be daunting and thrilling. “As a CIO, that is what you dream about. You dream about being on the apex of those sorts of issues in an effort to make a distinction,” Grayling mentioned. “With that comes a sure diploma of duty.”
He has the assist of his C-suite friends and an organization tradition that embraces the chance inherent to making an attempt new issues. If one thing doesn’t work, it received’t cease the corporate from making an attempt once more.
“They are not painless episodes, however it would not cease all the things in its tracks,” Grayling mentioned. “Nobody likes to get something improper, however there’s undoubtedly an amazing tradition of transferring on, making that call … and being smarter the subsequent time.”
As Florida Crystals appears for methods to undertake agentic AI, Grayling continues to consider the problem of change administration. Individuals have to undertake new methods of working, moderately than reverting to what they’ve performed previously. What’s going to that appear to be?
“With agentic AI, I believe we’re getting individuals to belief these brokers like they belief their present workers, getting them to have the ability to efficiency handle these brokers, like they efficiency handle these workers, and actually personal the entire,” Grayling mentioned.
Whereas technological change is never with out its obstacles, Grayling is optimistic that Florida Crystals will probably be remodeled but once more. “I believe the way in which our firm will work in a 12 months or two from now will look very, very completely different than it appears at present.”
