Home Business Intelligence Florida Crystals concentrates SAP in internet hosting candy spot

Florida Crystals concentrates SAP in internet hosting candy spot

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Florida Crystals concentrates SAP in internet hosting candy spot

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“I inherited a present from the earlier CIO,” says Florida Crystals CIO Kevin Grayling. “I had a contemporary S/4HANA panorama for almost all of the enterprise.”

That may have been an enviable scenario for a lot of of his contemporaries within the shopper packaged items (CPG) trade — “Some have 20 or 30 completely different ERP options,” he says — however for Grayling, the 20% of the enterprise nonetheless working on a legacy SAP product remained a supply of discomfort, and one thing he needed to alter.

Florida Crystals grows sugar cane, candy corn, and rice in Florida and elsewhere. It additionally runs ASR Group Worldwide, a sugar refining and advertising firm it owns collectively with Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida. ASR has operations throughout Europe and North and Central America, and sells sugar beneath the Domino, Redpath, Sidul and Tate & Lyle manufacturers.

Kevin Grayling

Kevin Grayling, CIO, Florida Crystals 

Florida Crystals

It’s ASR that had the extra trendy SAP set up, S/4HANA 1709, working in a digital personal cloud hosted by Virtustream, whereas its mum or dad languished on SAP Enterprise Suite. “Its processes remained untouched for practically 20 years,” he says.

When Grayling joined the corporate in 2017, he targeted on enterprise course of transformation, which went nicely so long as the processes involved didn’t cross the boundary between SAP cases — a problem he encountered whereas remodeling source-to-pay processes throughout the 2 techniques by implementing SAP Ariba.

“Everytime you’ve received two ERPs, it makes a venture or a change like that rather more sophisticated, and way more costly,” he says.

In fact, his predecessor knew that too, and so the consolidation of the 2 SAP techniques was beneath dialogue for nearly a decade by the point Grayling lastly satisfied his fellow executives that the price of consolidation could be lower than persevering with with separate techniques. “It required a number of promoting,” he says. “It was simpler to do with a powerful monetary profit, for positive.”

Over the course of a 12 months, he mentioned the necessities with executives in control of finance, procurement, and provide chain, amongst others, earlier than deciding on a plan of action.

A type of necessities was to maneuver out of its internet hosting supplier information middle and right into a hyperscaler’s cloud.

Florida Crystals was one in every of Virtustream’s first clients. Initially, the internet hosting supplier was a great match, however a decade on, he says, “Digital Personal Cloud, which as soon as was the one method of doing it, grew to become outdated. It was costing us some huge cash.”

In the meantime, by means of 2017 and 2018, he says, “there was a giant surge in corporations transferring from normally on-premises information facilities to AWS or Azure, after which discovering a companion to run their SAP within the cloud. Virtustream couldn’t compete.”

One other requirement was to get the 2 companies on the identical SAP software, upgrading ASR to S/4HANA 2020, the newest model on the time of the transfer, and migrating Florida Crystals to it from Enterprise Suite on HANA.

With a lot altering, that meant Grayling had an vital determination to make: brownfield or greenfield? In different phrases, ought to he attempt to maintain the S/4HANA 1709 workflows from ASR within the new system, or begin over and reengineer every part for S/4HANA 2020?

To reply that, he and his colleagues carried out an exhaustive evaluation, even deploying course of mining instruments from Celonis to raised perceive how their current techniques labored and what enhancements they might make.

“We needed to grasp what the extra advantages of doing a greenfield migration could possibly be,” he says. In the long run, he says, the numbers pointed towards a brownfield migration, an extended however much less dangerous path.

Reference implementation

Grayling reached out to his community to establish an implementation companion. Lemongrass Consulting was already working SAP for an agricultural cooperative and for a shopper merchandise agency the place he had contacts. “It was most likely the simplest determination I’ve had primarily based on reference in over 25 years in IT,” he says.

Whereas he had no sturdy choice for one hyperscaler over one other, on the time of the transfer, AWS had a transparent lead within the variety of SAP environments it hosted — and was additionally Lemongrass’s most well-liked host.

These discussions coincided with SAP’s launch of its Rise all-in-one internet hosting, licensing, and software administration providing. Grayling briefly thought-about it, however at the moment of the choice, it was too new to decide to. As an alternative, he says, he’ll stick to the bring-your-own license mannequin for the subsequent three to 5 years whereas he extracts the price, operations, and agility advantages of transferring to a hyperscaler. Then in three or 4 years, they will consider Rise once more.

The preliminary plan was emigrate ASR’s current S/4HANA surroundings from Virtustream to AWS and improve it in a single operation in January 2022, then consolidate Florida Crystals’ enterprise from its legacy surroundings six months or so later.

“We shortly realized there was an excessive amount of danger with doing migrate and improve on the similar time,” he says, so it was break up into two operations, with the improve occurring simply three weeks later. The cutover plan labored flawlessly with zero incidents, and just a bit wonderful tuning wanted later, he provides. The improve was extra complicated as a result of SAP had deprecated a few of the performance from S/4HANA 1709 within the newer model.

“We did a giant research on the finish of the earlier 12 months on what modified, so we might get forward of that,” he says. “We needed to do a number of purposeful testing to ensure.”

Just one small factor marred the improve: a efficiency difficulty for a couple of hours on the second day of their go-live. Grayling put that all the way down to not being completely positive how the outdated system was configured. “If you’ve had an SAP surroundings with a companion for so long as we did, you don’t all the time seize all of the idiosyncrasies of your customizations working in that surroundings. There was somewhat bit of information switch we misplaced.”

The consolidation part was harder. The plan was for Florida Crystals to undertake ASR’s enterprise processes to maintain the SAP core clear, however they operated in utterly completely different fields, one in agricultural merchandise and the opposite in shopper packaged items. “There was a number of change administration, getting them to agree,” he says.

One other problem was the information migration.

“The important thing factor with an SAP go-live — I’ve finished over 20 in my profession — is the standard of knowledge migration and the standard of testing,” he says. “You need check scripts recognized early to allow them to be confirmed, and also you need to automate as a lot of that testing in regression as doable so that you’re not simply carrying individuals out.” The corporate partnered with HCL to construct and automate a testing platform and spent two months on consumer acceptance testing.

Grayling warns to not underestimate the work concerned in information migration ­— particularly between Enterprise Suite on HANA, which is basically an SAP ECC information mannequin, and an S/4HANA system. “There’s a number of deprecated code, and the information mannequin may be very completely different between the 2 platforms,” he says. Numerous information will get left behind: historic monetary info is decreased to abstract balances, with no transactional element.

In reward of change

Whereas Florida Crystals profited from the steadiness of its ERP system over twenty years, there have been disadvantages when the time lastly got here to alter the processes. “We had been on Enterprise Suite on HANA for over 20 years,” he says, “so there was a abilities hole in us understanding why they’re configured that method. If you’re utilizing a system for that size of time and also you don’t change it, that data fades away. If you’re making change, you retain that data. We needed to relearn it.”

The consolidated system went reside in September 2022. “These large enterprise course of consolidation and customization areas are all the time a wrestle, however it went comparatively nicely,” he says. And the argument in favor of the brownfield migration has stood the check. “We’ve finished a post-implementation evaluate and the enterprise case is 100% sound,” he says. The transfer to the cloud can be delivering the anticipated worth.

There’s a sustainability facet to why they picked Lemongrass and AWS too. “For those who evaluate a digital personal cloud in a devoted information middle to a hyperscaler, byte for byte, CPU cycle for CPU cycle, there are important greenhouse fuel emission reductions, in addition to vitality consumption advantages,” he says.

Grayling additionally sees economies of scale outdoors the information middle: “Consider all of the vitality that goes into software program growth life cycles. For those who don’t try this, you’re a extra sustainable enterprise.”

In comparison with custom-built functions, software-as-a-service or standardized cloud-based options constructed on a standard core saves growth effort. “Change is difficult,” he says, “so in the event you can deal with adoption quite than design, construct, check, and implement, you’ll be able to spend vitality on the issues that matter most, on how one can turn into extra productive.”

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