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Florida Crystals’ CIO on using the Celonis Platform to unlock the power of data, free up millions in working capital, and make AI work at one of the largest growers of sugarcane in the U.S.
Over the past few years, the agriculture sector has poured billions of dollars into technology to collect and analyze data. Many players in the space are still trying to figure out how to put that data to work.
At Florida Crystals, we’ve taken a massive leap toward that goal. And Process Intelligence played a key part in that. Let me explain why.
At Florida Crystals, we’ve built a successful farm-to-table business. We grow our sugarcane year-around with our raw product turning from stalk to sugar crystal within 24 hours of harvest.
But, as the world continues to change faster than ever, I consider my main responsibility to invest in the right technology, to make our processes more intelligent and our teams more efficient.
The way you get to total efficiency is: you don't do it at all. That's the gold standard of an intelligent process — one where you can pretty much take the human out of it and just let the business engine run.
After all, you don't manage a car's engine when you're driving it. You focus on the traffic in front of you.
We're lucky that, at Florida Crystals, we've already done a lot of the major technological upgrades that most companies are now undergoing. We’ve consolidated our SAP landscape, and have a modern tech infrastructure in place. So we can get straight to the punchline: What is our data telling us about the way we’re operating?
And Process Intelligence — specifically the Celonis Platform — proved to be a powerful amplifier to understand our data. (You can read up on our Celonis journey here.)
Your data is telling you a lot. But it’s just not always easy to filter out what really matters: Because the data isn’t shouting at you, it’s whispering.
For example: Invoices aren’t saying, “Pay me!” because the end of the cash discount period is coming closer. So it’s easy to miss those opportunities to unlock more value and improve things.
But that’s what Celonis does: Their combination of process mining and AI helps us find the value in every process corner.
“To me, Celonis is an enterprise performance management platform, helping you make data-driven business decisions.”
The first time I saw a digital twin of our Source-to-Pay process in Celonis, I was blown away: We found millions of dollars in missed cash discounts. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in duplicate payments SAP didn’t catch. It felt like putting a magnifying glass on our operational data, helping us see where and why we were doing things inefficiently.
All of that is augmented with process knowledge and AI to get to the bottom of inefficiencies and resolve them, fast. To give just one example: Not only have we saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by reversing duplicate invoices, we've saved many, many hours of effort finding them in the first place.
It's very easy to spend a lot of money, time, and resources on AI and end up with nothing to show for it. Celonis’ built-in AI has proven in a very short timeframe that we can extract value out of it quickly and cost-effectively.
“Celonis not only tells you how your business is performing, but also whether your data is bad.”
“We racked up several hundred thousand dollars worth of savings within the first month of go-live.”
When you try and build an IT organization fit for the future, the greatest challenge is getting people to work differently. A lot of our staff have been here 20, 30, 40 years. So change management is hard. And frankly, technology makes it harder much of the time. Even if the tool itself promises great benefits, what puts teams off sometimes is the effort and the time it takes to realize them.
Working with Celonis was different. It is rare to have as much fun implementing technology as we've had with Celonis. Within a couple of weeks, we got the data model (connecting our Procurement and Accounts Payable data) up and running. Within a day, we trained our AP Director on the platform. I’ve never seen the Chief Accounting Officer and the Head of AP adopt anything as fast as this.
It’s the Apple effect. People love their products because they’re so intuitive and easy to use. Our business stakeholders said the same about Celonis — and they're getting value out of it very, very quickly.
Ultimately, I want to AI-enable our entire enterprise. I believe that in five years, people will only interact with their data through gen AI prompts, not a typical SAP screen. And one of the things that could help us get there is the Celonis AI Copilot.
Imagine a smart chat bot you can ask literally any question about a given process:
People can already get that info today. It just requires a lot more mouse clicks and report pulling. Doing it with AI will truly democratize process optimization.
Ultimately, you have two options: You can wait around for the legacy players to embed AI capabilities into their systems. Or you can get started today with a Context Model (like the Celonis Context Model) that sits on top of your systems and makes AI work for you. Easy decision.
“Like AI — if you're not using Process Intelligence, you are missing a massive opportunity.”
Want to learn more about our journey with Celonis? Read Florida Crystals' full customer story.
