True to its name, 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.

Main­tain­ing a ful­ly inte­grat­ed farm-to-table oper­a­tion at scale requires a ful­ly inte­grat­ed source-to-pay appli­ca­tions land­scape, accord­ing to Arturo Schuler, Glob­al IT Solu­tion Own­er at Flori­da Crystals. 

At the cen­ter of that land­scape sits SAP S/4HANA, which serves as Flori­da Crys­tals’ core ERP sys­tem and is orbit­ed by many satel­lite appli­ca­tions, all of which play a role in the corporation’s pro­cure­ment process. 

Imple­ment­ing SAP Ariba

Since 1995, when SAP was first intro­duced at Flori­da Crys­tals through an imple­men­ta­tion of SAP R/3 2.2E, the two com­pa­nies have remained aligned through more than 25 years of merg­ers and acqui­si­tions, opti­miza­tions, and tech­ni­cal upgrades. As oper­a­tions grew, and Flori­da Crys­tals acquired sub­sidiaries run­ning dis­tinct ERP sys­tems, dif­fer­ent areas of the busi­ness were left run­ning dif­fer­ent ver­sions of SAP. 

In his tenure at Flori­da Crys­tals, Schuler has seen the com­pa­ny shift from SAP ERP Cen­tral Com­po­nent (ECC) 6.0 to an on-premis­es deploy­ment of SAP S/4HANA 1709, com­plet­ed in 2018. Fol­low­ing a peri­od of func­tion­al­ly dri­ven process trans­for­ma­tions, Flori­da Crys­tals more recent­ly con­sol­i­dat­ed ERP sys­tems into one glob­al SAP S/4HANA 2020 envi­ron­ment, which went live in Sep­tem­ber 2022. 

Even before that, in 2019, Schuler worked to imple­ment SAP Ari­ba across Flori­da Crys­tals’ source-to-pay process­es with­in the U.S. and Cana­da. ​“It was a huge invest­ment by Flori­da Crys­tals to imple­ment SAP Ari­ba,” Schuler told ASUG, esti­mat­ing that the sys­tem — which went live in Jan­u­ary of 2020 — touch­es 80% of the company’s source-to-pay processes. 

Across a three-phase roll­out, Schuler over­saw the imple­men­ta­tion of:

1. SAP Ari­ba Invoice Man­age­ment and Invoice Con­ver­sion Ser­vice partnership
2. SAP Ari­ba Buy­ing & Invoic­ing, Sourc­ing & Con­tracts, Sup­pli­ers inte­gra­tion and Ari­ba Catalogs
3. SAP Busi­ness Net­work Sup­ply Chain Col­lab­o­ra­tion (SCC) for Sup­pli­er Man­aged Inven­to­ry (SMI), SAP Inte­grat­ed Busi­ness Plan­ning (IBP) Fore­cast Col­lab­o­ra­tion, and Qual­i­ty Collaboration

Part of Flori­da Crys­tals’ pro­cure­ment strat­e­gy involved onboard­ing more sup­pli­ers into the SAP Ari­ba net­work, now SAP Busi­ness Net­work. Ini­tial­ly hav­ing only two or three sup­pli­ers through SAP Ari­ba, the busi­ness now works with more than 700 sup­pli­ers in the SAP Ari­ba net­work. Schuler not­ed change man­age­ment, over­seen by leads on the pro­cure­ment and accounts-payable teams, involved ​“con­stant­ly mon­i­tor­ing how adop­tion was hap­pen­ing and rein­forc­ing it through com­mu­ni­ca­tions and train­ing,” in addi­tion to month­ly calls. 

Imple­ment­ing SAP Ari­ba solu­tions meant upgrad­ing user inter­faces for var­i­ous end users, some of whom had worked for mul­ti­ple years in pre­vi­ous on-premis­es SAP sys­tems and were ini­tial­ly wary of log­ging into a web-based appli­ca­tion like SAP Ari­ba to com­plete tasks. 

Inte­gra­tion issues encoun­tered post-go-live took time to address, adding to inter­nal issues with adop­tion. Giv­en that Ari­ba was acquired rather than cus­tom-built by SAP, for exam­ple, input fields ini­tial­ly var­ied in length between the appli­ca­tions, mean­ing that trans­ac­tions couldn’t always be copied suc­cess­ful­ly from SAP S/4HANA to SAP Ari­ba, he said. To close such gaps, Flori­da Crys­tals engaged cus­tomer suc­cess man­agers assigned to their account as part of its SAP Pre­ferred Care sup­port offerings.

“We relied on top man­age­ment and var­i­ous vice pres­i­dents to be on board with this project and to sup­port the pro­gram,” he said. ​“It was not easy, but I think we ful­ly sta­bi­lized a year after the first go-live, and we were able to shift the focus to con­tin­u­ous improve­ment and maintenance.”

A Strate­gic Source-to-Pay Landscape

As at many intel­li­gent enter­pris­es, source-to-pay process­es at Flori­da Crys­tals start with a demand for goods or ser­vices. A pur­chase req­ui­si­tion is gen­er­at­ed, and its pro­cure­ment team eval­u­ates dif­fer­ent poten­tial sources of those items. Once a sup­pli­er is select­ed, the req­ui­si­tion is con­vert­ed into a pur­chase order and sent to the sup­pli­er, which then ships goods or ren­ders ser­vices. These and oth­er trans­ac­tions are doc­u­ment­ed in SAP S/4HANA, at which point an invoice receipt is processed. 

Today, Flori­da Crys­tals’ source-to-pay land­scape is made up of var­i­ous appli­ca­tions that revolve around its imple­men­ta­tion of SAP S/4HANA 2020, now run­ning on Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS).

“These appli­ca­tions are not cre­at­ing new trans­ac­tions as SAP Ari­ba does, but some could be extract­ing data for report­ing or for min­ing,” Schuler explained. SAP Inte­grat­ed Busi­ness Plan­ning (IBP), for exam­ple, is used to enter the fore­cast­ed demand of fin­ished goods. Data from bills of mate­ri­als can be ana­lyzed to cas­cade that demand into fore­cast­ed demand for com­po­nents, align­ing pro­cure­ment and pro­duc­tion plan­ning process­es at Flori­da Crystals.

Flori­da Crys­tals cre­ates its pur­chase req­ui­si­tions in either SAP S/4HANA or SAP Ari­ba. In instances where req­ui­si­tions come from planned main­te­nance work orders, the SAP Ari­ba Cat­a­log work­space is lever­aged; when req­ui­si­tions are cre­at­ed from mate­ri­als require­ment plan­ning (MRP) runs, SAP IBP is lever­aged to main­tain align­ment with pro­cure­ment and pro­duc­tion plan­ning processes. 

Ana­plan, mean­while, is lever­aged for bud­get­ing pur­pos­es, while DocuSign is embed­ded in SAP Ari­ba for e‑signatures, and SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form is con­nect­ed to allow end users to approve pur­chas­ing doc­u­ments via the stan­dard BTP inbox solu­tion. SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud pro­vides Flori­da Crys­tals with enter­prise dash­boards, while Celo­nis is used for process min­ing and automa­tion, and Microsoft Pow­er BI is used as a self-ser­vice report­ing tool. 

Though many of its ven­dors are SAP Ari­ba-enabled, Schuler also not­ed Flori­da Crys­tals is engag­ing in automa­tion via Relish’s Invoice AI, dig­i­tiz­ing invoic­es from ven­dors with­out an SAP Ari­ba account through OCR (opti­cal char­ac­ter recog­ni­tion) and ML (machine learn­ing), then trans­mit­ting them into SAP Ariba’s invoice man­age­ment appli­ca­tion to enable invoice rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. For onboard­ing and SAP Ari­ba train­ing, Flori­da Crys­tals uti­lizes dig­i­tal adop­tion plat­form What­fix. One­Source addi­tion­al­ly serves as its tax engine, con­nect­ed to SAP Ari­ba and used to val­i­date tax data dur­ing invoice reconciliation.

Fac­ing the Future

In gov­ern­ing the land­scape, Schuler is dri­ven to sim­pli­fy the source-to-pay process as much as pos­si­ble for end users.

“There are cons to hav­ing too many appli­ca­tions and mak­ing end users log into too many dif­fer­ent web­sites or desk­top appli­ca­tions to com­plete their work,” he said. ​“This also adds com­plex­i­ty in imple­ment­ing gov­er­nance con­trol for appli­ca­tions main­te­nance and security.”

That said, func­tion­al stake­hold­ers across Flori­da Crys­tals oper­ate from a posi­tion of want­i­ng to keep the com­pa­ny com­pet­i­tive in terms of tech­nol­o­gy adop­tion, which often leads Flori­da Crys­tals to adopt new solu­tions as they hit the mar­ket. ​“Ide­al­ly, I’d be fas­ci­nat­ed to know if one appli­ca­tion, such as SAP S/4HANA, can deal with every process we require,” Schuler noted.

Since con­sol­i­dat­ing Flori­da Crys­tals’ ERP sys­tems into one glob­al SAP S/4HANA 2020 envi­ron­ment, the company’s source-to-pay process­es have been pos­i­tive­ly impact­ed, par­tic­u­lar­ly in terms of user experience. 

Flori­da Crys­tals’ pro­cure­ment team is a cen­tral­ized, shared ser­vices depart­ment based in the U.S., which meant that regions were rep­re­sent­ed in mul­ti­ple instances. ​“Imag­ine hav­ing the same region in two dif­fer­ent ERP sys­tems,” he said. ​“The same buy­er or end user had to log into mul­ti­ple instances to per­form their work.” 

Log­ging into one ERP sys­tem has con­sid­er­ably sim­pli­fied this work­stream. Project orga­ni­za­tion, process stan­dard­iza­tions, and new con­fig­u­ra­tions no longer need to be dupli­cat­ed across sys­tems, nor do mul­ti­ple end users need to test these updates in each sys­tem separately. 

“It was once a con­vo­lut­ed process, but we got rid of all that,” Schuler said, not­ing that the over­all direc­tion of Flori­da Crys­tals’ tech­nol­o­gy aligns with his approach to the company’s source-to-pay landscape. 

“I always go for sim­plic­i­ty,” he said.