Florida Crystals simplifies SAP environment with move to AWS

Forward-thinking approach

When FCC was a small agricultural company 27 years ago, it implemented its first SAP ERP. Back then, the company had relatively simple IT requirements and business processes, but the CEO at the time recognized it would need a system that could meet future needs as the company grew, Grayling said.

The company was an early adopter of many SAP initiatives and products. For example, it was the first company to move an on-premises ERP Central Component (ECC) environment to a virtual private cloud, which was hosted and managed by cloud services provider Virtustream, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies.

It was also the first company to move to the HANA database; the first to move to S/4HANA; the first to adopt several SAP cloud products, including Analytics Cloud and Integrated Business Planning; and the first to adopt what at the time was called SAP Public Cloud and is now known as S/4HANA Cloud.

When FCC decided to plan for the future of its SAP environment around 2018, the company decided to consolidate its cloud infrastructure and migrate to the public cloud as a way to reduce operational costs and focus on business process transformation. It was already using S/4HANA, but the business processes were aging and inefficient, Grayling said.

"The SAP landscape was like having straight, flat and wide roads that you could drive fast on, but the problem was the [processes] were like cars from 1970," he said. "They were inefficient, they took too long to get the result, and they were ineffective."

Focus on transforming business processes

Before the move to public cloud, FCC spent time transforming its business processes rather than the underlying landscape.

When we do things, there's a lot of cross-functional processes between the companies. It's much simpler doing it in one S/4HANA environment.

When the cloud consolidation project started, Grayling was managing three distinct SAP environments. One was an S/4HANA version 1709 system that was running in the Virtustream virtual private cloud, which ran about 80% of the company's transactions; the second was a legacy SAP Business Suite on HANA, also running on Virtustream; and the third was an SAP Public Cloud ERP running at the Belize refinery facility.

The project's goal was to consolidate all three SAP environments into one public cloud infrastructure for simplicity, Grayling explained. Previously, when the company needed to build processes that spanned SAP applications, it had to add customizations for specific environments so that the processes could talk to each other. Migrating to a single underlying infrastructure changed that.

"When we do things, there's a lot of cross-functional processes between the companies," Grayling said. "It's much simpler doing it in one S/4HANA environment."

When it came to choosing a managed services provider, FCC chose to go with Lemongrass as it offered the most comprehensive and cost-effective public cloud services for SAP at the time. Lemongrass only offered AWS management services then, but has since included Azure and GCP. FCC had an existing relationship with AWS for cloud services.

Flexibility is the key

Grayling considered Rise with SAP, SAP's initiative to offer customers a SaaS-like deployment option, but Lemongrass offered a more flexible bring-your-own-license model.

"Rise was still very new, and we weren't sure that going down an SAP subscription model with SAP would give us the flexibility we might need later," he said. "You're signing up for a five-year relationship that's very hard to extract yourself from if things aren't going well, and you have to give up a lot of license assets that you would not get back."

So, FCC has kept the SAP licenses it acquired over 20 years, and Lemongrass purchases the AWS services and runs the environment and SAP Basis, the administration platform for SAP systems.

"We've retained some senior Basis expertise because we need to make sure that we know what's happening and we can understand it and agree with it strategically," Grayling said. "We don't need to be operationally focused on [running SAP], but when we have operational questions or recurring issues, we need that expertise to know which way is up."

Migrate, then upgrade

FCC structured the project in two pieces, Grayling explained. First, it migrated the S/4HANA 1709 instance from the Virtustream private cloud to the Lemongrass AWS infrastructure and upgraded to the most current version of S/4HANA. The second and more complex piece was moving the Business Suite on HANA system and the SAP Public Cloud in the Belize facility to AWS and consolidating those business processes onto the S/4HANA model.

The main challenge for any move from a legacy SAP system to S/4HANA is the differences in the data models, he said.

"The functionality of how you do financial controlling or consolidations doesn't change too much, but the data migration and data model differences were the most complex part of the project," Grayling said. "Especially if you're moving to a public cloud model, because the public cloud is a different data model from ECC."

By moving the SAP environment to Lemongrass managed services on AWS, the company reduced operating costs by up to three times compared with the private cloud on Virtustream, and it reduced the cost and complexity of customizing the system, he said.

FCC has relatively simple business processes that don't need to be significantly differentiated from more complex consumer packaged goods company processes, so Grayling was looking to move away from the software customization development cycle.

"[Getting out of customizations] allows us to focus on the real value proposition of digital transformation, which is adoption -- how can you get the users to use the capabilities they've been given in the right way that makes them more efficient and effective," he said.

FCC's next move

Now, FCC is focused on improving sustainability and reducing the amount of energy it uses to grow, refine and make sugar into products, Grayling said.

The company has initiated Project Evolution, an agricultural commodity trading and risk management project on SAP Master Contract Management, which accounts for the origination of raw sugar and its movement from mills to refineries, as well as the physical contracts for raw sugar and energy usage.

"This is a big business process transformation, and probably the last big one that we need to do, because it's replacing a lot of manual or outdated processes and systems," Grayling said.

The company is also planning for the convergence of manufacturing operations, he said. The FCC IT team plans to integrate production control systems upstream into the purchase and delivery of raw materials and packaging, and downstream through the supply chain, accounting and HR.

It's easier for FCC's IT team to do this now that the company is operating on a modern platform with capabilities that are more advanced than those usually found in the operations platforms. However, those platforms are catching up quickly, according to Grayling.

"There's a lot of investment and venture capital going into manufacturing technology, and we're doing some exciting things with packaging lines and with refining assets in terms of IoT and predictive maintenance," he said. "It's easier to integrate what we're building there back into our corporate ERP because it's modern and simple."

Jim O'Donnell is a senior news writer who covers ERP and other enterprise applications for TechTarget Editorial.

Tech News This Week 04-21-2023

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