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.Related: CEOs and CIOs unite: How AI strategy is reshaping executive partnerships
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,wich 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 archit
Digital Transformation Fuels Resilience at Florida Crystals
Florida Crystals Corporation, a leading U.S. producer of sugarcane, beet sugar, and citrus, recognized the need for digital transformation long before the pandemic forced many businesses to rapidly adapt. This foresight proved crucial when COVID-19 disrupted global supply chains and necessitated a shift to remote work.
Prior to the pandemic, florida Crystals proactively upgraded its infrastructure, laying the groundwork for a more resilient and efficient operation. Recognizing the potential for widespread remote work, the company completed a major telecommunications overhaul, transitioning from a customary, PBX-driven voice calling network to Microsoft teams. This move not only reduced telecom expenses by 78% but also better prepared the company for the demands of a remote workforce.
The company also implemented SAP’s Ariba as a new source-to-pay system in the U.S. and Canada. This enabled the management of invoices, purchase order creation, and digital payments, streamlining financial processes.
Embracing process intelligence and AI
Integrating process intelligence has been a core component of Florida Crystals’ transformation journey. In late 2021, the company began utilizing the Celonis platform to gain deeper insights into and improve its business processes.
Over the past few years, Florida Crystals has deployed the Celonis platform across its finance, procurement, and inbound supply chain operations.
“We implemented dashboards for accounts payable so they could see missed supplier discounts, possibly duplicate invoices,” Grayling shared. His team continuously refined these models, achieving greater accuracy with each iteration.
The platform’s automation capabilities significantly reduced manual workload across various applications.
“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 explained.
It has also simplified the onboarding process for 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…
Florida Crystals Bets on AI to Sweeten Operations and Embrace Future of Work
Florida Crystals, a leading sugar producer, is aggressively pursuing a technology transformation centered around Artificial Intelligence (AI), aiming to optimize operations from mill efficiency to harvest planning and fundamentally change how its workforce operates. The company is leveraging partnerships with Microsoft and C3 AI,alongside its existing SAP data models,to build and deploy AI-powered solutions.
CIO David Grayling emphasizes the power of the company’s existing SAP infrastructure, stating it “provided a great platform to automate and visualize within SAP.” Florida Crystals is now building on this foundation by creating AI agents within Microsoft’s Copilot Studio platform. together, they are collaborating with C3 AI on bespoke projects focused on improving mill optimization and harvest planning.
This push into AI isn’t without its challenges. Grayling acknowledges the daunting, yet exciting, nature of such a large-scale transformation. “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,” he said, adding that this ambition comes with significant responsibility.
A key enabler of this transformation is a supportive company culture that embraces experimentation and learning from failures. grayling highlights that setbacks are viewed as opportunities for enhancement, rather than roadblocks. “They’re not painless episodes, but it doesn’t stop everything in its tracks,” he explained. “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.”
Looking ahead, Grayling is focused on the critical aspect of change management as Florida Crystals explores “agentic AI” – AI systems capable of acting autonomously.The goal is to foster trust in these AI agents, enabling employees to manage and oversee their performance in a similar manner to human colleagues. “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 stated.
Grayling is optimistic about the future, predicting a significant shift in how Florida Crystals operates within the next year or two.”I think the way our company will work in a year or two from now will look very, very different than it looks today.”