With Celonis, Florida Crystals has successfully steered their S/4HANA transformation, slashed duplicate payments, and unlocked millions within a matter of months.
With migration deadlines looming and new technologies like AI rapidly evolving, IT needs to handle a lot of things at once. All while empowering the business to drive maximum ROI out of their tech stack. That’s why Kevin Grayling, Vice President & Chief Information Officer at Florida Crystals, is laser-focused on making the company’s processes more intelligent — and its teams more efficient — with the help of technology partners like Celonis.
The Celonis Process Intelligence Platform has helped the sugar producer make the right business case for their S/4HANA transformation, and turn Accounts Payable into a real value magnet.
The result? A data-driven migration approach, and millions of dollars in working capital unlocked in less than a year.
Making the right business case for S/4HANA
Florida Crystals grows, harvests, mills and refines its sugarcane in the Sunshine State — as well as globally through its companies, selling under brands such as Domino, C&H, Redpath, Sidul, and Tate & Lyle.
Their path to value with Celonis began with their S/4HANA transformation back in 2021. It’s no secret that an ERP migration is neither simple nor fast. Completing it in two years is considered rapid – three years plus is more typical. With Celonis, Florida Crystals pulled it off in twelve months. Here’s how. While Florida Crystals benefited from the stability of its SAP Business Suite over two decades, there were some challenges when the time came to change the processes on it. “There was a gap in us understanding why they’re configured the way they were,” says VP and CIO Kevin Grayling.
Partnering with Celonis, they used process mining to create a digital twin of their business. Think of an X-ray, that shows how processes actually run. “It took us only three weeks to see our entire Source-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash process,” recalls Grayling. “So we got an extremely fast and detailed understanding of our process adherence and where we had process issues.”
Having a clear picture of how their business operated not only helped IT and the process owners save a lot of time and effort in the documentation and design phase. It made their business case airtight. “Our discussions with SAP experts were often anecdotal. Celonis helped make the decision to go brownfield very scientifically.”
And the argument in favor of the brownfield migration has stood the test. The move to the cloud is also delivering the expected value. → Read Grayling’s blog on how Florida Crystals uses Celonis to transform their business.
“We’ve done a post-implementation review and the business case is 100% sound.”
Kevin Grayling, VP and CIO, Florida Crystals
The insights and value opportunities the IT team unearthed quickly sparked wider interest. “I remember our CFO asking when he could get his hands on Celonis,” says Grayling. IT made sure to deliver.
Unlocking millions in Accounts Payable
“In Accounts Payable, we racked up several hundred thousands dollars worth of savings within the first month of go-live”, says Grayling. “I've never seen us do something like that, that fast.”
Creating a digital twin of Source-to-Pay, Celonis provided unprecedented visibility into where Florida Crystals had previously left money on the table.
For instance, Celonis intelligent automation capabilities, called Action Flows, send daily alerts on upcoming cash discounts, so the team can act upon them. Celonis also enabled smarter invoice processing, prioritizing invoices by cash flow impact rather than first in, first out.
The platform flags potential duplicates that SAP would easily miss, helping the team prevent millions of dollars going out the door. Think duplicates that don't match exactly — but have similar invoice numbers, dates, quantities, or prices. “Celonis allowed us to become proactive instead of reactive, so we're not chasing duplicate payments and trying to recover those funds,” says Jennifer Ginn, Director of Accounts Payable at Florida Crystals.
“We've reduced the number of duplicate payments by 98%. It’s been amazing.”
Jennifer Ginn, Director of Accounts Payable, Florida Crystals
The best thing: it’s all automated. Using fuzzy match logic, Celonis sets billing blocks for potential duplicates in SAP, flagging them for human verification. The team can then quickly reverse duplicate invoices or remove blocks for confirmed non-duplicates. “It's a click of a button in Celonis, and we're done.”
Creating a common language for the business
As a back-office function that’s usually seen as a cost rather than a profit center, it can be hard to change the course of the business. Ginn would often struggle to get the data she needed to drive conversations with other teams like Procurement or Operations. “We would have anecdotal evidence about issues, but we really never had data supporting it. That has completely changed with Celonis.”
Her team can now point out bottlenecks upstream, such as when a vendor’s delivery performance prevents them from realizing a cash discount, or missing goods receipts are causing payment delays. Simply put: They now have a common language of how the business truly runs. “Suppliers might submit invoices more than once or deliver after their cash discount deadline. Because we can see that now, we have more meaningful conversations.”
“Our image has completely changed. We’re now considered an equal partner rather than a back-office function. Because we truly add value upstream.”
Jennifer Ginn, Director of Accounts Payable, Florida Crystals
Unlocking more value, process by process
The Florida Crystals IT team is seeing similar effects. “Our main mission is to improve productivity and empower the business,” says Corey Swenson, VP IT Global Strategy and Architecture. “Celonis really accelerates that. We're not talking about realizing value in a six to twelve months, but in a few weeks. That gave us a lot of credibility.” And it made the conversations about new use cases much easier.
Another game changer? Celonis’ ease of use. After just a few hours of training, AP Director Jennifer Ginn demonstrated the platform to a steering committee the next day. “I've never seen adoption as fast as this — it was overnight,” confirms CIO Grayling.
Going forward, the plan is to scale Celonis across the business — from Procurement to Plant Maintenance to Internal Audit. For Grayling, Celonis has become both an amplifier and enabler he can’t do without. “If you’re not using Process Intelligence to hear what your data is trying to tell you, you’re essentially deaf.” → Read Grayling’s blog on why Process Intelligence is also a key enabler for AI.
