When Kevin Grayling stepped into the CIO function at sugar cane firm Florida Crystals in 2017, he felt he was inheriting a very good 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 fashionable enterprise course of know-how panorama with SAP,” he mentioned.
Grayling got here to Florida Crystals from Kraft Meals/Mondelēz, and a variety of his expertise translated. Each corporations have manufacturing and client 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 area, that was a studying curve,” he mentioned.
Grayling has actually gotten up to the mark. Throughout his tenure on the firm, he has been concerned in additional than 20 digital transformation tasks. He gave InformationWeek an inside have a look at a few of these tasks and talked concerning 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 transport the sugar it produces and buys for purchasers 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 proportion 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 a variety of precision agriculture applied sciences to automate planning and executing its farming. It has a historical past of modern partnership with SAP. “We put SAP within the cloud in 2009, 2010 with our accomplice Virtustream,” Grayling mentioned. “We had been the primary firm on the planet to implement SAP HANA. We had 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 battling among the challenges different comparable enterprises confronted on the time, comparable to shifting to the cloud and ECC to S/4 upgrades.
“I’d undoubtedly go toe-to-toe with my friends within the trade about the place we’re on that journey versus the place they’re, and what benefit that offers us for the following 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 crew 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 surroundings, in a digital non-public 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 a variety of infrastructure providers that match round SAP, in keeping with 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 international occasion.
Whereas sugar can’t be made remotely, the corporate’s roughly 3,500 workplace staff would wish to shift to a distant work mannequin. Florida Crystals completed a serious 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 carried out 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 raised 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 carried out dashboards for accounts payable so they might see missed provider reductions, doubtlessly duplicate invoices,” Grayling shared for instance. He and his crew honed these fashions a number of instances, attaining extra accuracy with every iteration.
The platform’s automation eradicated a big quantity of handbook work inside its numerous use circumstances.
“The dashboard is absolutely presenting to you in a really easy-to-access, apparent approach what must be achieved. And it permits the folks working in that crew to deal with doing that quite than determining what must be achieved,” Grayling mentioned.
It has additionally streamlined onboarding new crew members. “It is simpler to get them up to the mark and competent in that course of than it may need been doing it within the extra handbook approach,” Grayling mentioned.
Florida Crystals continues to deepen its relationship with Celonis. The corporate is exploring as much as 30 extra use circumstances throughout customer support, finance, HR and different areas. Celonis will likely 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. Fairly, Grayling and his crew look to make use of what’s native to the platforms the corporate makes use of. It’ll additionally look to leverage AI embedded in its strategic companions, comparable to Microsoft and SAP.
“They [Celonis] actually perceive the SAP enterprise course of hierarchy,” Grayling mentioned. “They actually perceive SAP information fashions. They’ve supplied a terrific platform to automate and visualize inside SAP.”
By its partnership with Microsoft, the corporate is seeking to create brokers throughout the Copilot Studio platform, in keeping with Grayling. Florida Crystals has additionally labored with C3 AI to develop bespoke AI tasks 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 so that you could make a distinction,” Grayling mentioned. “With that comes a sure diploma of duty.”
He has the help of his C-suite friends and an organization tradition that embraces the chance inherent to attempting new issues. If one thing doesn’t work, it received’t cease the corporate from attempting once more.
“They don’t seem to be painless episodes, however it does not cease every thing in its tracks,” Grayling mentioned. “Nobody likes to get something improper, however there’s undoubtedly a terrific tradition of shifting on, making that call … and being smarter the following time.”
As Florida Crystals appears for tactics to undertake agentic AI, Grayling continues to consider the problem of change administration. Individuals must undertake new methods of working, quite than reverting to what they’ve achieved up to now. What’s going to that seem like?
“With agentic AI, I feel we’re getting folks to belief these brokers like they belief their current staff, getting them to have the ability to efficiency handle these brokers, like they efficiency handle these staff, and actually personal the entire,” Grayling mentioned.
Whereas technological change isn’t with out its obstacles, Grayling is optimistic that Florida Crystals will likely be reworked but once more. “I feel the way in which our firm will work in a 12 months or two from now will look very, very totally different than it appears immediately.”
