First came a spin­off to pri­vate-equi­ty own­er­ship two years ago.

Then came the acqui­si­tion of a major com­peti­tor two months ago.

Now the clock ticks on a 12-month project to shift the merged com­mer­cial indus­tri­al light­ing busi­ness — as much as pos­si­ble, of all peo­ple, key func­tions, process­es, and tech­nol­o­gy — to SAP S/4HANA. And, addi­tion­al­ly, to improve effi­cien­cies and busi­ness results along the way.

That’s the short sto­ry from GE Cur­rent CIO Mark LeClair, who dis­cussed chal­lenges, com­plex­i­ties, progress, lessons to date, and advice he’d offer oth­er orga­ni­za­tions of mid­mar­ket size that are fac­ing mul­ti-com­pa­ny busi­ness, tech­nol­o­gy, and func­tion­al integrations. 

Inno­vate, Sim­pli­fy, and Streamline

“This is an oppor­tu­ni­ty for us to let the experts do what they do; to let the host­ing providers do what they do — SAP and AWS col­lec­tive­ly,” LeClair said, adding, ​“To let all the right peo­ple do what they do best so that we can lever­age and use the solu­tion to inno­vate with the busi­ness, improve our busi­ness process­es, and stream­line fea­tures and func­tion­al­i­ties with­in the orga­ni­za­tion by using the core SAP prod­uct on the S/4HANA platform.”

LeClair could not have known that he and his team would be where they are now when he took the tech lead­er­ship role in 2019, just after GE sold its com­mer­cial indus­tri­al light­ing busi­ness to Amer­i­can Indus­tri­al Prod­ucts (AIP). At the time, GE Cur­rent ran SAP ECC 6.0 and ​“all the tra­di­tion­al bolt-ons — Con­cur, Ari­ba — that you’ll find in a big cor­po­ra­tion like that,” he said.

For the next 18 months, GE Cur­rent focused on its ECC instance, opti­miz­ing and right-siz­ing appli­ca­tions and process­es for the stand­alone busi­ness. Mean­while, LeClair empha­sized ​“appli­ca­tion port­fo­lio rationalization.”

“We took the port­fo­lio of appli­ca­tions — whether inte­grat­ed with SAP or not — and ratio­nal­ized all 200-plus of them. We start­ed to con­vert [or] shut off, or changed a lot of those appli­ca­tions to right-size them for the size of the com­pa­ny that [we] now are. We had to ratio­nal­ize that port­fo­lio and shrink the appli­ca­tion foot­print to fit the busi­ness needs,” he explained.

GE Cur­rent used the par­ent company’s ​“full-fledged Hype­r­i­on,” Oracle’s finan­cial report­ing and analy­sis sys­tem, appro­pri­ate to ​“a big con­glom­er­ate,” LeClair not­ed. The inde­pen­dent GE Cur­rent adopt­ed OneStream to per­form the same work.

Acqui­si­tion Includ­ed SAP S/4HANA

As the stand­alone tech­nol­o­gy and appli­ca­tion ratio­nal­iza­tion work con­tin­ued last year, the prospect of pair­ing with archri­val Hub­ble Light­ing through acqui­si­tion became attrac­tive, a more promis­ing growth path instead of what can be typ­i­cal under pri­vate-equi­ty own­er­ship. And now, with that deal com­plete just weeks ago, LeClair, the inter­nal team, and key part­ners are tak­ing on the acquired company’s SAP S/4HANA migra­tion and oth­er tasks. The merged orga­ni­za­tion is still AIP-owned.

LeClair, who char­ac­ter­ized the company’s cur­rent state as ​“in the throes of sep­a­ra­tion from the greater Hub­ble orga­ni­za­tion,” said that ​“even though Cur­rent pur­chased Hubbell Light­ing, from a tech­nol­o­gy foot­print, we’re kind of doing a reverse trans­ac­tion because we want to go to the S/4 plat­form — it’s a new­er, mod­ern ver­sion of SAP and it saves me from hav­ing to do any mas­sive chang­ing in the ECC land­scape. We’re carv­ing out the Hubbell Light­ing busi­ness from Hub­ble and we’re carv­ing in the cur­rent busi­ness onto the S/4 plat­form.” Specif­i­cal­ly, the com­pa­ny aims to have an S/4HANA Pri­vate Cloud instance with SAP, all by year-end.

The orga­ni­za­tion already envi­sions improve­ments via SAP S/4HANA Cloud, including:

• Improved busi­ness process­es using SAP S/4HANA — for native appli­ca­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly sup­ply-chain improve­ments, as well as order-to-cash processes
• Sim­pli­fied work­flows using core, basic SAP func­tion­al­i­ty; accel­er­at­ing go-to-mar­ket for the com­bined organization’s prod­ucts and services
• Man­u­fac­tur­ing and inven­to­ry con­trol, through stan­dard­iza­tion and SAP S/4HANA native man­u­fac­tur­ing capabilities

Mas­ter Data Ratio­nal­iza­tion Is Key

But progress isn’t with­out chal­lenges. Accord­ing to LeClair, ​“Mas­ter data ratio­nal­iza­tion is going to be a very com­pli­cat­ed process because we use very sim­i­lar mate­ri­als. When we start­ed to ratio­nal­ize some of the parts and pieces, there was a lot of what they call a ​‘part’ we have as a ​‘fin­ished prod­uct’ using that part num­ber — those kinds of things.”

“Mas­ter data ratio­nal­iza­tion is going [to] be extreme­ly key to get to where we need to end up,” he emphasized.

To achieve the tech­no­log­i­cal and envi­sioned busi­ness improve­ments, LeClair assem­bled a cross-func­tion­al inter­nal team sup­ple­ment­ed by key part­ners, and, of course, SAP. His lean inter­nal IT staff col­lab­o­rate with inter­nal func­tion­al leads — sales and mar­ket­ing, finance, and the like. They also col­lab­o­rate with part­ners that han­dle project man­age­ment, appli­ca­tion man­age­ment ser­vices, and con­fig­u­ra­tion, among oth­er elements.

LeClair is also quick to note the organization’s reliance on peers, com­mu­ni­ties, and resource con­nec­tions through ASUG, espe­cial­ly giv­en the tight timeline.

“I real­ly had to lever­age — through this par­tic­u­lar trans­ac­tion with Hubbell Light­ing, mov­ing from an ECC plat­form to S/4, under­stand­ing the capa­bil­i­ties of RISE with SAP. Using all of those learn­ings through the part­ner­ship with ASUG and SAP clear­ly helped me make the deci­sions that we did,” he said.

Now that the deal’s done, and that inte­gra­tion and SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion are under­way — with mile­stones achieved and many to meet — what does LeClair remind him­self and GE Cur­rent regard­ing every­day essentials?

“We’ve got to keep it sim­ple. We’ve got to keep it stan­dard, mean­ing out of the box. And we’ve got to put in solu­tions that solve busi­ness prob­lems. Those are the three things that I think are key to everybody’s suc­cess,” he said.