Ahead of the ASUG Exec­u­tive Exchange 2025 Spring Sum­mit (March 4 – 6), we learned more about how Eco­bat is dig­i­tiz­ing the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my of bat­ter­ies via RISE with SAP. Atten­dees had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to hear Jamie Lee, Chief Infor­ma­tion Offi­cer at Eco­bat, speak in per­son about the com­pa­ny’s expe­ri­ence as one of the first RISE with SAP cus­tomers. With a strong peo­ple-first approach, Jamie dis­cussed how align­ing data strate­gies with busi­ness goals can dri­ve trans­for­ma­tion while engag­ing exec­u­tives in a con­ver­sa­tion about the evolv­ing role of AI in decision-making. 

Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, the most recy­cled U.S. con­sumer prod­uct is not plas­tic, paper, or alu­minum: by weight, it’s lead, a resource used in near­ly every area of mod­ern society. 

Air­plane man­u­fac­tur­ers need lead bat­ter­ies for air­craft elec­tron­ic and alloys, hos­pi­tals and data cen­ters rely on it for test­ing equip­ment, and lead is present through­out the auto­mo­tive indus­try, includ­ing as a core com­po­nent in bat­ter­ies; by 2030, it’s expect­ed that 2 bil­lion vehi­cles will rely on lead bat­ter­ies, includ­ing elec­tric cars and renew­able ener­gy such as solar and wind pow­er systems. 

A Leader in the Cir­cu­lar Economy 

Lead is also high­ly sus­tain­able, and more than 99% of the met­al can be recov­ered and repur­posed, an excep­tion­al recy­cling rate that helps to keep 100+ mil­lion bat­ter­ies out of land­fills each year. Today, lead con­tin­ues to be recy­cled from exist­ing resources with­in the low­er emis­sion and sus­tain­able mod­el of pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion known as the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my; its per­for­mance remains con­sis­tent how­ev­er long it’s used, mit­i­gat­ing the need for addi­tion­al lead, and oth­er bat­tery com­po­nents to be mined. 

A glob­al leader in the recy­cling of lead and lithi­um bat­ter­ies, Eco­bat is pow­er­ing the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my with its com­mit­ment to safe­ty and sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Head­quar­tered in Dal­las, Texas, with over 2,700 employ­ees dis­trib­uted across facil­i­ties locat­ed on three con­ti­nents, the $2.3 bil­lion company’s over­ar­ch­ing mis­sion — to lead the respon­si­ble col­lec­tion, recy­cling, pro­duc­tion, and dis­tri­b­u­tion of resources essen­tial to mod­ern life — is enabled by more than 65,000 bat­tery col­lec­tion points glob­al­ly. Eco­bat is also tack­ling the ris­ing vol­ume in recy­cla­bil­i­ty of lithi­um bat­tery demand with oper­a­tions across Ger­many, the U.K., and the U.S.

Such an advanced logis­ti­cal net­work requires a mod­ern, sus­tain­able, and intel­li­gent tech­nol­o­gy infra­struc­ture. Eco­bat, how­ev­er, had his­tor­i­cal­ly been struc­tured in func­tion­al and geo­graph­ic silos with inef­fi­cient col­lab­o­ra­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion between its teams; the company’s use of email, spread­sheets, and paper-based sys­tems at times result­ed in addi­tion­al miss­ing data, errors, and time delays across work­flows. Espe­cial­ly with bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy evolv­ing to include new chemistries such as zinc, lithi­um, and graphene, the need for Eco­bat to embark on dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion became appar­ent even before the wide­spread dis­rup­tion of a glob­al pandemic. 

Under the lead­er­ship of Jamie Lee, Chief Infor­ma­tion Offi­cer at Eco­bat, the orga­ni­za­tion began a mul­ti-year ini­tia­tive to sim­pli­fy and evolve its tech­nol­o­gy land­scape — inter­nal­ly referred to as Project Essen­tial — in ear­ly 2021. Ecobat’s first step: engag­ing RISE with SAP to facil­i­tate its move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Expand­ing Ecobat’s Dig­i­tal Reach

Accord­ing to Lee, who detailed the company’s trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney at the ASUG Exec­u­tive 2025 Spring Sum­mit, major pain points at Eco­bat includ­ed risk expo­sure, frac­tured data, inef­fi­cient process­es, and lega­cy ERP sys­tems. At the core of all these issues was Ecobat’s aging tech­nol­o­gy, which posed cyber­se­cu­ri­ty and busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity threats while pro­vid­ing lim­it­ed or no vis­i­bil­i­ty for mea­sur­ing and improv­ing per­for­mance with­in oper­a­tions and procurement. 

Con­sol­i­dat­ing into a Sin­gle Cloud ERP

Fol­low­ing a tech­nol­o­gy busi­ness review, Eco­bat estab­lished its ​“Dig­i­tal Reach” objec­tives, intend­ed to turn the com­pa­ny into a best-run busi­ness by enabling stan­dard­iza­tion, har­mo­niza­tion, and glob­al­iza­tion for its process­es and data. Crit­i­cal to the project was an empha­sis on Ecobat’s core sus­tain­abil­i­ty objec­tives, as well as the con­sol­i­da­tion of 26 sep­a­rate ERP sys­tems into a sin­gle cloud ERP across its geographies. 

“Our under­in­vest­ment in tech­nol­o­gy in the past had left us with 26 dif­fer­ent ERPs, but if the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my is to be as effi­cient as we want it to be, we need to be effi­cient inter­nal­ly, with our IT sys­tems,” explained Lee. 

“Going to the best cloud ERP plat­form in the world with SAP made sense as a call to urgency,” he added. ​“Post-pan­dem­ic, as the world comes alive again and starts to address elec­tri­fi­ca­tion ver­sus petro­le­um-based fuel or ener­gy deliv­ery, Eco­bat has to move faster than the mar­ket­place is mov­ing. And so, we had to race to the cloud.”

What is Project Essential?

Project Essen­tial was approved by Eco­bat in Jan­u­ary 2021, and the com­pa­ny was rec­og­nized as the first RISE with SAP cus­tomer the fol­low­ing month. A long-time vet­er­an of SAP, Lee cred­its the RISE offer­ing, and the SAP sup­port ser­vices it includes, with the suc­cess of the initiative. 

“It sud­den­ly became much more palat­able to con­tract with SAP,” he said. ​“RISE puts a team around com­pa­nies, rather than a sales agent who gets his license deal, wish­es us good luck, and walks away.”

Project Essen­tial offi­cial­ly launched in May 2021, with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud land­scape avail­able in June 2021, 90% of Ecobat’s glob­al tem­plate estab­lished by August 2022, and the company’s last glob­al go-live com­plet­ed in ear­ly 2023. Eco­bat was ulti­mate­ly able to dis­con­tin­ue its on-premis­es data cen­ter, decreas­ing its ener­gy con­sump­tion foot­print; today, Eco­bat is 95% in the cloud and work­ing to address its remain­ing 5% of on-premis­es operations.

As part of Project Essen­tial, Eco­bat made the deci­sion to move from its pre­vi­ous ERP land­scape—SAP ECC and 26 instances of AS/400 lega­cy sys­tems at its part­ner loca­tions world­wide — into a sin­gle instance of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Lever­ag­ing RISE with SAP to map and move all indi­vid­ual sys­tems into the cloud ERP, Eco­bat also adopt­ed new stan­dard­ized process­es as it worked through the dif­fer­ences between its old and new ERP systems. 

Reduc­ing instances of Eco­bat data has enabled its team to make bet­ter deci­sions and improved vis­i­bil­i­ty of the company’s over­all costs. Approach­ing the trans­for­ma­tion as a green­field net-new imple­men­ta­tion while fol­low­ing indus­try best prac­tices also allowed Ecobat’s team to opti­mize mul­ti­ple busi­ness process­es along the way and fur­ther reduce the over­all com­plex­i­ty of its ERP landscape. 

“Dis­parate datasets make for mis­guid­ed man­age­ment,” Lee said. ​“When you’ve got a board that wants you to do right with cap­i­tal allo­ca­tion, you’ve got to have real-time data. You want to be on top of the mar­ket. In fact, you want to pre­dict the mar­ket. How can you do that when every­thing is so dis­parate? Going to the cloud-first S/4 SAP busi­ness plat­form made per­fect sense.”

Lee now looks back favor­ably on the expe­ri­ence. ​“The RISE jour­ney to S/4 was sim­pler than I thought it would be,” he said. ​“The cloud envi­ron­ment was sim­pler than I thought it would be. RISE is going to help us lever­age the back office and get real-time vis­i­bil­i­ty of our sup­ply-chain data, to keep us resilient and ahead.” 

The Future of Ener­gy at Ecobat

Ecobat’s SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion, enabled by RISE with SAP, has already yield­ed key ben­e­fits for the com­pa­ny, from boost­ing its cyber­se­cu­ri­ty pro­tec­tions to enhanc­ing busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity across operations. 

The dig­i­ti­za­tion of cloud ERP also allows for more effec­tive team­work, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion between teams locat­ed in dif­fer­ent geo­gra­phies, while cer­tain areas of the busi­ness are already tak­ing advan­tage of the automa­tion capa­bil­i­ties enabled by SAP S/4HANA Cloud. 

With one source of finan­cial data, a greater focus can be placed on stan­dard costs, and mul­ti­ple oper­a­tions have been stream­lined, evolv­ing Eco­bat into a lean­er, more prof­itable glob­al enter­prise. Sup­ply chain plan­ning, in terms of vol­ume and recog­ni­tion of where demand comes from, is more achiev­able with the avail­abil­i­ty of real-time data, lead­ing to greater cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion. And by dig­i­tal­ly opti­miz­ing its own oper­a­tions and inte­grat­ing sus­tain­abil­i­ty data cap­ture tech­nol­o­gy across the busi­ness, Eco­bat has become a more sus­tain­able com­pa­ny, inter­nal­ly man­ag­ing its own cir­cu­lar econ­o­my and envi­ron­men­tal, social, and cor­po­rate gov­er­nance (ESG).

“Hav­ing a secure foun­da­tion is the right way to build a house,” Lee said of Ecobat’s suc­cess with SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Now, he’s look­ing to the future, with the company’s U.K.-based per­son­nel, orga­ni­za­tion, sup­ply chain prac­tices, and account­ing all going live on SAP in Octo­ber, and go-lives still ahead for France and Ger­many. ​“It’s been three years since we start­ed,” Lee said. ​“We’re still mid-trans­for­ma­tion, but it’s all rolling in the right direction.”

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