Florida Crystals: Sowing the seeds for more-efficient customer interactions with modern integration capabilities
Crystallizing application integrations and customer interactions
Florida Crystals Corporation, a vertically integrated sugarcane company, wanted to modernize its B2B ordering and invoicing. Selecting SAP Integration Suite and the Trading Partner Management and Integration Advisor capabilities in the suite to better manage its application integrations and customer interactions has delivered significant cost savings and a faster onboarding process.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Agribusiness and consumer products | West Palm Beach, Florida | ~2,100 employees (Florida) |
integrations migrated from legacy middleware to SAP Integration Suite.
IT cost savings.
faster to onboard new customers.
IT Director, Florida Crystals Corporation
Supporting a business-critical process with a modern integration platform
With its origins tracing back to the 1850s, Florida Crystals Corporation is the first and only grower of Regenerative Organic Certified® sugarcane in the United States. From farm to table, it cultivates, mills, refines, packages, and sells sugar to retailers and foodmakers. With family-owned farms across more than 190,000 acres in Florida, the company is committed to regenerative and ethical farming practices. Florida Crystals also reuses sugarcane pulp (bagasse) to generate power in its sugar operation in Florida.
The sugarcane company was using a legacy platform as an electronic data interchange (EDI) to process up to 75% of its B2B orders as well as send invoices. Underpinning a critical function with an outdated and unsupported middleware system comprising SAP Process Orchestration software and SAP Process Integration technology created a challenge for the business. Sukarna Chirumamilla, IT director at Florida Crystals, explains, “Our EDI and B2B integrations were running on a web-method system that we couldn’t upgrade, so there was a serious risk to our operations if something were to happen to that technology.” The company therefore sought a modern platform for its ordering and invoicing processes.
IT Director, Florida Crystals Corporation
Transforming ERP, integration, and B2B capabilities
Florida Crystals has a long-standing relationship with SAP that goes back almost 30 years. The company has been gradually transforming its ERP, adopting an SAP Cloud ERP Private solution through the RISE with SAP journey to consolidate its ERP systems. With a cloud solution as its core ERP systyem and a strategy to use an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), it also adopted SAP Integration Suite. Florida Crystals migrated most of its application-to-application integrations from SAP Process Orchestration software and SAP Process Integration technology to the suite with help from the migration service for SAP Integration Suite. It also employed the Cloud Integration technology and API Management capabilities to help it smoothly migrate the integrations from its middleware software to SAP Integration Suite.
More recently, the sugarcane company began a project to replace its B2B system with a future-ready solution. After almost eight months of planning and investigating solutions in the market, the company deployed the Trading Partner Management and Integration Advisor capabilities in SAP Integration Suite. The capabilities streamline the management and governance of Florida Crystals’s relationships, agreements, and interactions with its customers. It can tailor its B2B data exchange to meet specific needs, defining and configuring EDI protocols, standards, and application programming interfaces (APIs) for each customer. See the figure for the company’s IT architecture.
IT Director, Florida Crystals Corporation
Reducing costs and onboarding time with a single tool and support team
Florida Crystals migrated almost 450 integrations from SAP Process Orchestration and SAP Process Integration to SAP Integration Suite as part of its ERP transformation. In comparing SAP Integration Suite with web-method solutions, it found that the total cost of ownership was lower. Chirumamilla outlines, “If we bring a new technology or tool into our landscape, we have to pay the entire licensee cost of it. With the license model of SAP Integration Suite, there’s a base cost and a cost around the number of messages we transfer. This results in huge IT cost savings of about 80%.” The company can also support integrations across the organization with a single team.
Florida Crystals has improved the ease and speed of onboarding new customers. By significantly reducing the period from 16 weeks to between 4 and 6 weeks, it can now onboard customers almost three times faster than before. Chirumamilla highlights, “We do business with our customers based on contracts, and new customers expect to communicate using EDI because it’s more efficient than e-mail or fax. We need to onboard customers through EDI quickly so that they feel connected to our systems and can start interacting with us without delay.” The company has successfully migrated its 260 customers to SAP Integration Suite, decommissioning its previous system from the integration space. Another benefit of adopting an iPaaS solution is that Florida Crystals can rely on regular system updates (weekly, monthly, and quarterly).
IT Director, Florida Crystals Corporation
Investigating the use of APIs and AI
The integration strategy being followed by Florida Crystals focuses on maximizing its use of APIs to improve integrations instead of doing point-to-point or other types of integrations. The company believes APIs are the easiest way to exchange messages between systems and platforms in terms of speed, security, and reliability. The sugarcane business has also conducted a proof of concept for Event Mesh capabilities in SAP Integration Suite to explore use cases for event-based integrations. These enable the event-driven architecture to allow applications to communicate asynchronously in real time across distributed landscapes. It’s also considering using SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh to process a very high volume of events and enable business processes at scale.
Florida Crystals is developing an AI strategy to see how it might adopt generative or agentic AI capabilities to enhance its business processes. Chirumamilla concludes, “As an SAP-first company, we consider SAP innovations and products before we look elsewhere. We’re in the early stages of bringing AI into our organization, and we’re trying to understand where to use it and how it can benefit our business. As our core system and business functions are supported with SAP solutions, we definitely think that AI-enabled software from SAP can help us.” The company’s recent migration from SAP S/4HANA to SAP Cloud ERP Private will help it ready its system for future AI projects.