Mark LeClair stepped into the role of CIO at Current Lighting just as the company was entering a period of foundational transformation.
Born through a carve-out from General Electric (GE) in 2019 and expanded through the 2022 acquisition of Hubbell Lighting, Current Lighting was tasked with unifying two distinct organizational lineages under one operational model. With 3,000 employees and a growing, global footprint, the company faced both the complexity of scale and the pressure of private equity ownership.
Its SAP landscape mirrored that complexity. A heavily customized SAP ECC system came from GE: sprawling, rigid, and heavy with a decade of historical data. From Hubbell: an SAP S/4HANA environment prioritizing customer experience through manual processes and minimal automation.
These disconnected platforms and fragmented processes had made it difficult for Current Lighting to function as one enterprise. “We had to break all those walls down,” LeClair recalled. Beyond simply integrating software, the work involved reconciling two contrasting approaches to process, culture, and technology.
Rather than treating the ERP initiative as a back-office upgrade, LeClair framed it as something much broader. “An ERP project is not an IT project; it’s a business transformation project,” he emphasized. “Every segment of your business is going to be touched in one way, shape, or form.” With this philosophy in place, LeClair focused early efforts on aligning executive leadership and establishing shared principles for simplification, standardization, and operational discipline.
Across the company, leaders were accustomed to siloed systems and inconsistent process ownership. Changing that dynamic would require a fundamental shift in operating culture. LeClair clarified that transformation would affect every part of the organization, and that ownership couldn’t rest with IT alone.
With that principle established, he formed an executive steering committee that included the CFO, COO, general managers, and CEO. “Every executive on the team here at Current Lighting was incorporated in the decision-making process,” he noted.
This group became the anchor for decision-making throughout the program and gave LeClair the backing to drive simplification and hold the line against customization. “If it does not make us any money, if it’s not regulatory required, we’re not going to do it,” he affirmed. “I call it the two by two: it costs you twice as much, it takes you twice as long.” That clarity allowed the team to accelerate delivery, avoid rework, and standardize business processes across legacy operations.
One of the most effective strategic choices was to aggressively scope down the data conversion by not carrying over all historical data. “We only focused on what was open at the time of conversion and the year-to-date data,” explained LeClair. This strategy enabled rapid execution, reduced testing cycles, and lowered costs.
LeClair describes it as “an agile migration approach.” The transformation began in August 2022 and reached go-live by March 2023. “We were testing data in the first pilot in about 45 to 50 days,” he noted. “That’s what RISE does for you—it enables you to focus on the data, not standing up infrastructure.”
LeClair pointed to the SAP client delivery manager assigned to Current Lighting as a critical factor in the project’s success. “They were the quarterback of SAP,” he said, adding that their know-how in navigating the processes within the ecosystem makes them “worth their weight in gold if you have a good one.” Rather than passively accepting the assigned resource, LeClair recommends treating the selection as a hiring decision, interviewing, challenging, and replacing if needed to get the right fit.
Partner governance also played a central role. Current Lighting engaged cbs Consulting for the data carve-out and a boutique firm for functional support. But LeClair insisted on a true partnership model. “That partner has to be the one also challenging the customer on customizations and opportunities,” LeClair stressed. “They’re not just order takers.”
By anchoring the program in simplification, speed, and executive alignment, Current Lighting avoided the pitfalls of traditional migrations and instead focused on building a platform that could evolve with the business.
Current Lighting had successfully consolidated its SAP environments onto SAP S/4HANA by March 2023. The team had replaced two fragmented, incompatible systems with a unified, modern core in just seven months. This efficiency resulted from disciplined scoping, clear priorities, and governance that aligned every decision with business value.
The company now runs on standardized processes that span previously siloed business units. Data is cleaner and more accessible. Maintenance costs are lower, and decision-makers have real-time visibility into operations.
The “clean core” approach has become a governing principle for how IT and business stakeholders interact at Current Lighting. “It’s not just words,” he said. “It’s enabling our ability to reduce maintenance costs, maximize the value of our cloud investments, and take advantage of some of the features and functions that come inherent with the system.”
Staying aligned with SAP in terms of their innovation strategies and direction will be key to sustaining that value. “If you’re on SAP’s journey, you get to take advantage of the innovations they already have inherent in the system,” noted LeClair.
The success of Current Lighting’s transformation reflects a series of disciplined choices, each grounded in a philosophy of simplification, partnership, and proactive ownership. These choices now shape how the company operates and how its leaders think about future transformation.
LeClair’s advice:
- Don’t wait for the kick-off. Build executive accountability from the beginning. “Encourage that executive steering committee concept and mindset very, very much at the very beginning of your journey,” he said. For transformation to succeed, business leaders must take shared responsibility from the outset, not only for funding and resourcing, but for defining value and making hard trade-offs.
- Readiness was another key differentiator. “Make sure you have the right skills, the right people, and that the company is prepared and ready for a project of that magnitude and size,” advised LeClair. “We saved ourselves tons of money by archiving aggressively.”
- Partnership quality also proved to be a make-or-break factor. LeClair urges organizations to interrogate their system integrators, push back on boilerplate solutions, and avoid the trap of vendor dependency.
LeClair sees the project as part of Current Lighting’s broader focus on continuous improvement. “We’re always looking to figure out how to do it better and where we can optimize and improve, which just by definition is going to foster innovations organically,” he noted while discussing a mindset grounded in clean core principles and the Six Sigma philosophy.
Going forward, the leader said the emphasis is now on agility and the clean core. “That will hopefully set us up for taking advantage of innovations that come along with the digital transformation that SAP makes and how we can take advantage of those,” he noted, pointing toward analytics, process optimization, and things that “enable us to drive business value out of a system versus a system being a roadblock.”
Perhaps the most meaningful outcome is not the successful go-live itself, but the evolution of IT from a siloed entity to a strategic partner in future innovation. “You need to get onto the other side of that fence as fast as you can get there,” said LeClair. “Now that we’re there, we’re an enabler.”