Florida Crystals Advances SAP Transformation with Data Readiness Focus
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Key Takeaways
Florida Crystals Corporation is partnering with Lemongrass and Syniti to enhance data readiness for a Clean Core SAP transformation, focusing on improving the quality and relevance of enterprise data before major system changes.
The project prioritizes the assessment and cleansing of customer master data and plant maintenance data, aiming to reduce data complexity and improve usability, minimizing transformation risks.
A successful Clean Core strategy involves reducing custom code and ensuring reliable data, highlighting the importance of data readiness in modernizing SAP systems.
Florida Crystals Corporation (FCC), a sugar producer and parent company of ASR Group, the world’s largest cane sugar producer, has selected Lemongrass and Syniti (part of Capgemini) as strategic partners to strengthen data readiness and support a Clean Core SAP transformation. The project will focus on data assessment designed to help the company prepare for broader SAP modernization initiatives.
Data Readiness Ahead of SAP Transformation
The company is prioritizing improving the quality, structure, and relevance of enterprise data before undertaking major system changes. The initial phase of the project will focus on customer master data and plant maintenance data, helping the company separate business critical information from legacy data debt accumulated over time.
By identifying duplicates, inconsistencies, and low value records, FCC aims to reduce complexity and improve data usability across its SAP environment. This data first approach is intended to lower transformation risk while creating a stronger foundation for future growth.
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Enabling a Clean Core SAP Strategy
For FCC, which also operates in bioenergy and agribusiness, Clean Core means reducing custom code and having reliable data to support standardized processes and modern SAP systems. The company is addressing data quality beforehand to make modernization efforts more reliable and prevent existing issues from being carried into the new system.
“Clean Core isn’t just about simplifying code; it’s about ensuring that the data powering business processes is accurate, relevant, and optimized,” said Corey Swenson, VP IT Enterprise Systems, Data and Analytics for ASR Group, a subsidiary of Florida Crystals Corporation.
Combining SAP Transformation and Data Expertise
The project brings together complementary capabilities from Lemongrass and Syniti:
- Lemongrass provides SAP transformation and Clean Core expertise, helping organizations simplify ERP environments and prepare for cloud-centric SAP architectures.
- Syniti contributes deep specialization in data assessment, cleansing, migration, and governance, enabling organizations to improve data quality at scale.
Together, they are using data profiling, automated reporting, and clear recommendations to streamline data and improve accuracy, which are essential for SAP S/4HANA and Clean Core projects.
Henrik Wagner, Chief Partner Officer of Lemongrass said, “Many organizations struggle to achieve clean-core outcomes because their data foundations aren’t ready. Our partnership with Syniti and FCC breaks through that barrier by addressing data and process optimization together.”
“We’re very excited about the collaboration between Syniti and our Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP) to enable low down time migrations with the benefits of enhanced data quality. This is the gold standard for Cloud ERP transformations,” Wagner added.
What It Means for SAPinsiders
Data readiness is a prerequisite for SAP modernization. Data readiness is also an AI-readiness decision, not just a migration decision, because unreliable master and transactional data limits the effectiveness of analytics and automation layers that depend on consistent semantics. SAPinsiders planning AI-enabled scenarios should formalize “clean data + clean code” as a single transformation principle, then align tooling, operating model, and release governance to protect that Clean Core over time.
Clean-core programs increasingly start with data. More SAP teams are now treating Clean Core as a planned program discipline rather than an abstract ideal. Recent SAPinsider research shows 36% of those surveyed say they know about Clean Core and plan to use it in a future project, signaling a broad shift from awareness to execution planning. Data debt remains the hidden constraint on standard process adoption in SAP S/4HANA, so SAPinsiders should treat data assessment as an architectural workstream with deliverables such as domain ownership, quality rules, and relevancy decisions
Operational domains like customer master and plant maintenance are a pragmatic place to begin. This is because they quickly Reveal integration issues and deliver measurable business benefits when standardized. SAP leaders can test governance approaches in these domains before expanding to finance, supply chain, and procurement, where aligning processes and data is more complicated.
