When Kevin Grayling stepped into the CIO role at sugar cane company Florida Crystals in 2017, he felt he was inheriting a good starting place.
“My predecessor, the CIO Don Whittington, who had been with the company for about 17 years in that role, had really developed a very modern business process technology landscape with SAP,” he said.
Grayling came to Florida Crystals from Kraft Foods/Mondelēz, and a lot of his experience translated. Both companies have manufacturing and consumer packaged goods operations. But Florida Crystals also has an agriculture element to its business; it grows sugar cane that it makes into raw sugar. “The strategic thinking and how you automate or digitize processes in that space, that was a learning curve,” he said.
Grayling has certainly gotten up to speed. During his tenure at the company, he has been involved in more than 20 digital transformation projects. He gave InformationWeek an inside look at some of those projects and talked about the next steps for maintaining Florida Crystals’ tradition as an early adopter of technology.
Kevin Graling, CIO, Florida Crystals
The tech behind the sugar
Florida Crystals, founded in 1960, is a global company with markets in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Belize, Portugal, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean. It farms on thousands of acres and operates four sugar mills, 10 sugar refineries, 12 non-refinery facilities, and four renewable energy facilities, along with business offices and R&D facilities.
It has a supply chain logistics and multimodal transportation network for shipping the sugar it produces and buys for customers in industrial and grocery channels. Florida Crystals and ASR Group, which it owns, have an annual refining capacity of between 6 million to 7 million metric tons of sugar. It uses E2open supply chain software to manage its allocation of goods and benchmark its freight rates.
While the company makes and moves millions of tons of sugar, Grayling described the company’s enterprise architecture as relatively simple. The company’s previous model was 50% to 60% SaaS. Under Grayling’s leadership, that percentage shifted to 80% to 90%. He said he works collaboratively with the company’s agriculture, manufacturing and refining, and brand teams to ensure IT aligns operationally and strategically across operations.
The company leans into tech to drive its operations. It leverages a lot of precision agriculture technologies to automate planning and executing its farming. It has a history of innovative partnership with SAP. “We put SAP in the cloud in 2009, 2010 with our partner Virtustream,” Grayling said. “We were the first company in the world to implement SAP HANA. We were the first company in the world to implement SAP S/4HANA.”
He said he considers Florida Crystals more technologically advanced than other sugar companies, as well as many other food and beverage companies. He noted that when he joined Florida Crystals, it was not struggling with some of the challenges other similar enterprises faced at the time, such as moving to the cloud and ECC to S/4 upgrades.
“I would definitely go toe-to-toe with my peers in the industry about where we are on that journey versus where they are, and what advantage that gives us for the next few years,” Grayling said.
Driving digital transformation
Florida Crystals’ willingness to invest in technological transformation is part of what attracted Grayling to the company eight years ago. During his tenure, he has worked to build on the company’s tech-forward approach. From 2018 to 2022, he and his team focused on shifting operations across the company — including the supply chain, HR, finance, sales and customer service — to digital workflows.
The company ran SAP in an on-premises environment, in a virtual private cloud and on several cloud platforms. In 2022, Florida Crystals completed the migration of SAP into AWS with managed service provider Lemongrass. That migration allowed the company to retire a lot of infrastructure services that fit around SAP, according to Grayling.
Florida Crystals made two major digital transformation shifts right before the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, both of which helped it better manage the disruption of that global event.
While sugar cannot be made remotely, the company’s approximately 3,500 office workers would need to shift to a remote work model. Florida Crystals finished a major telecommunications overhaul, shifting away from a physical, PBX-driven voice calling network to Teams. Not only did the company’s telecom expenses drop by 78%, it was also better prepared for the demands of shifting.
The company also implemented a new source-to-pay system — SAP’s Ariba — in the U.S. and Canada prior to the onset of the pandemic. That shift meant the company was able to manage invoices, purchase order creation and make digital payments.
Embracing process intelligence and AI
Integrating process intelligence has been a core part of the company’s journey. In late 2021, Florida Crystals began to work with the Celonis platform to better understand and improve its business processes.
Over the past few years, Florida Crystals has used the Celonis platform in its finance, procurement and inbound supply chain operations.
“We implemented dashboards for accounts payable so they could see missed supplier discounts, potentially duplicate invoices,” Grayling shared as an example. He and his team honed those models multiple times, achieving more accuracy with each iteration.
The platform’s automation eliminated a significant amount of manual work within its various use cases.
“The dashboard is really presenting to you in a very easy-to-access, obvious way what needs to be done. And it allows the people working in that team to focus on doing that rather than figuring out what needs to be done,” Grayling said.
It has also streamlined onboarding new team members. “It’s easier to get them up to speed and competent in that process than it might have been doing it in the more manual way,” Grayling said.
Florida Crystals continues to deepen its relationship with Celonis. The company is exploring up to 30 additional use cases across customer service, finance, HR and other areas. Celonis will be integral to the company’s AI strategy.
“We’ll start to get really into not just the automation that the Celonis platform has given us and the machine learning that we’ve used so far in that platform, but [it] will get us into true agentic AI,” Grayling said.
Operating with an almost entirely SaaS ecosystem, Florida Crystals does not develop much software internally. Rather, Grayling and his team look to use what is native to the platforms the company uses. It will also look to leverage AI embedded in its strategic partners, such as Microsoft and SAP.
“They [Celonis] really understand the SAP business process hierarchy,” Grayling said. “They really understand SAP data models. They’ve provided a great platform to automate and visualize within SAP.”
Through its partnership with Microsoft, the company is looking to create agents within the Copilot Studio platform, according to Grayling. Florida Crystals has also worked with C3 AI to develop bespoke AI projects in mill optimization and harvest planning.
Tech transformation can be daunting and exciting. “As a CIO, that’s what you dream about. You dream about being at the apex of these kinds of things so that you can make a difference,” Grayling said. “With that comes a certain degree of responsibility.”
He has the support of his C-suite peers and a company culture that embraces the risk inherent to trying new things. If something doesn’t work, it won’t stop the company from trying again.
“They’re not painless episodes, but it doesn’t stop everything in its tracks,” Grayling said. “No one likes to get anything wrong, but there’s definitely a great culture of moving on, making that decision … and being smarter the next time.”
As Florida Crystals looks for ways to adopt agentic AI, Grayling continues to think about the challenge of change management. People need to adopt new ways of working, rather than reverting to what they have done in the past. What will that look like?
“With agentic AI, I think we’re getting people to trust those agents like they trust their existing employees, getting them to be able to performance manage those agents, like they performance manage those employees, and really own the whole,” Grayling said.
While technological change is rarely without its obstacles, Grayling is optimistic that Florida Crystals will be transformed yet again. “I think the way our company will work in a year or two from now will look very, very different than it looks today.”
