Flori­da Crys­tals Enhances SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form with SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite 

Among the ear­li­est adopters of SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP), Flori­da Crys­tals Cor­po­ra­tion (FCC) con­tin­ues to extract ever-sweet­er results from this invest­ment, lever­ag­ing the plat­form along with SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite to gain time effi­cien­cies, sim­pli­fy migra­tion activ­i­ties, and enhance inte­gra­tion between SAP and non-SAP systems. 

Flori­da Crys­tals grows, har­vests, and mills its organ­ic sug­ar­cane entire­ly in Flori­da, mak­ing it the only pro­duc­er of organ­ic raw cane sug­ar prod­ucts 100 per­cent made in the USA. Known for its gold­en hues and authen­tic fla­vor, the company’s home­grown raw cane sug­ar is mill-made and unre­fined, trav­el­ing from stalk to sug­ar crys­tal across farm­ing and milling oper­a­tions with­in 24 hours of harvest. 

As the state’s largest organ­ic farmer, Flori­da Crys­tals cul­ti­vates sug­ar­cane, rice, and veg­eta­bles across 190,000 acres in Palm Beach Coun­ty, where it also owns and oper­ates two sug­ar mills, a sug­ar refin­ery, a rice mill, a pack­ag­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ter, and the largest renew­able pow­er plant of its kind in North Amer­i­ca. Its sub­sidiary, ASR Group, joint­ly owned with Sug­ar Cane Grow­ers Coop­er­a­tive of Flori­da, is the world’s largest cane sug­ar refin­ing and mar­ket­ing com­pa­ny, with an annu­al pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty of more than 6 mil­lion tons of sug­ar; it sells sug­ar under Domi­no, Red­path, Sidul, and Tate & Lyle brands. 

Flori­da Crys­tals’ long­stand­ing SAP part­ner­ship began with its imple­men­ta­tion of SAP R/3, and the farm-to-table organization’s SAP land­scape has evolved over time with tech­nol­o­gy releas­es and addi­tion­al SAP solu­tions to sup­port oper­a­tions at more than 50 owned and trad­ing-part­ner facil­i­ties in the U.S. and Europe. 

Why FCC Lever­aged SAP BTP 

Between cor­po­rate and sub­sidiary growth — both organ­ic and through acqui­si­tions — and its Amer­i­can Sug­ar Refin­ing Group own­er­ship, FCC’s inte­gra­tion chal­lenges mount­ed over time, even after the orga­ni­za­tion embraced busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion with SAP S/4HANA in 2015 and migrat­ed to the cloud via a hyper­scaler three years later.

In 2022, as FCC moved ahead with SAP BTP to enhance its SAP envi­ron­ments and improve inte­gra­tion between SAP and non-SAP sys­tems, the company’s enter­prise archi­tects built a busi­ness case for invest­ing in SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite. 

A num­ber of fac­tors were at play in the team’s ini­tial deci­sion not to move for­ward with the suite with­in FCC’s larg­er SAP S/4HANA cloud trans­for­ma­tion, recalled Sukar­na Chiru­mamil­la, Enter­prise Archi­tect at Flori­da Crys­tals. ​“Due to the com­plex­i­ty and the depen­den­cy of our trad­ing cus­tomers, we chose not to do Elec­tron­ic Data Inter­change (EDI) migra­tion to SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite with the entire ERP migra­tion,” he said. ​“We want­ed to make sure we suc­ceed­ed in the ERP trans­for­ma­tion and then tack­le this one next.”

Today, Flori­da Crys­tals’ jour­ney with SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite is well under­way. Last year, said Chiru­mamil­la, the organization’s enter­prise archi­tects defined an inte­gra­tion strat­e­gy for the broad­er busi­ness and pro­vid­ed a proof of con­cept (POC) of EDI migra­tion to the orga­ni­za­tion. Strate­gi­cal­ly, their focus on inte­gra­tion aligns with what Chiru­mamil­la describes as the company’s ​“over­all IT strat­e­gy to ratio­nal­ize, sim­pli­fy, and move to a sin­gle cloud-based Inte­gra­tion Plat­form as a Ser­vice (IPaaS) model.”

The inte­gra­tion strat­e­gy coa­lesced around two imperatives:

• Sim­plic­i­ty, includ­ing a sim­pli­fied inte­gra­tion archi­tec­ture, stan­dards-based inte­gra­tion, and reli­able alert­ing and monitoring.
• Agili­ty, includ­ing the abil­i­ty to share data across enter­prise ecosys­tems in a secure and scal­able method, to adopt out-of-the-box and open inte­gra­tions, and to enable rapid new appli­ca­tion integrations.

Chiru­mamil­la not­ed the approach also fea­tures ​“a mot­to of API-first strat­e­gy, where we want to use APIs, rather than rely­ing on file-to-file inte­gra­tions.” Ini­tial POCs showed promis­ing results. Accord­ing to Chiru­mamil­la, Flori­da Crys­tals reduced the amount of time it takes to build inte­gra­tions and suc­ceed­ed in improv­ing the sim­plic­i­ty through which the busi­ness could cre­ate API integrations.

To do so, he explained, Flori­da Crys­tals lever­aged SAP train­ing and SAP-sup­plied Inte­gra­tion Suite ​“boost­ers” to gain famil­iar­i­ty, speed, and con­fi­dence with the tools. The ambi­tious EDI migra­tion project plan is cur­rent­ly in exe­cu­tion mode. Begin­ning in June, the plan calls for the migra­tion of around 400 Web­Meth­ods (EDI) inte­gra­tions to SAP Trad­ing Part­ner Man­age­ment (TPM) with­in SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite. Accord­ing to Chiru­mamil­la, goals for the year will focus on advanced oper­a­tional reli­a­bil­i­ty for enter­prise sys­tems and ana­lyt­ics, including:

• Con­verg­ing infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy (IT) and oper­a­tional tech­nol­o­gy (OT)
• Embed­ding automa­tion and pre­dic­tive mod­els in deci­sion tools
• Upgrad­ing OpenText
• Estab­lish­ing a data lit­er­a­cy program
• Exe­cut­ing EDI plat­form transition

How SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite Mod­ern­izes Processes 

Through the con­flu­ence of SAP BTP and SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite, FCC has unlocked auto­mat­ed mon­i­tor­ing and alert capa­bil­i­ties to proac­tive­ly man­age issues in busi­ness oper­a­tions. ​“We def­i­nite­ly will imple­ment auto­mat­ed mon­i­tor­ing and alert­ing through every inter­face, so that we don’t respond to issues after the fact,” Chiru­mamil­la said. With these capa­bil­i­ties, ​“we will know what is hap­pen­ing, and we will be able to go to the busi­ness, know that an inte­gra­tion failed, and say we’re look­ing into it.” 

Chiru­mamil­la reflect­ed on the ​“old way” of work­ing with trad­ing part­ners, in terms of set­ting up map­pings and cre­at­ing EDI inter­faces, and high­light­ed that Flori­da Crys­tals has ben­e­fit­ted from the ​“sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduced” time and effort need­ed to go through this process with SAP BTP and SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite TPM. 

“Today, we rely on SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite,” he empha­sized. ​“It per­fect­ly aligns with our needs, as it’s a cloud-based solu­tion man­aged by SAP, the back­bone of our oper­a­tions for the past 25 years. Adding any oth­er appli­ca­tion or tool for inte­gra­tion would be redundant.”

For more, read our Top Take­aways from the 2024 and 2025 SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Conference. 

You can also learn more about this top­ic at upcom­ing ASUG BTP Alliance Events. To find the next event, join the Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP) Com­mu­ni­ty Alliance.