Consumers with a penchant for sweetness are likely familiar with brands like Domino and C&H in the U.S., Redpath in Canada, Tate & Lyle in the U.K., and Sidul in Portugal—all produced by Florida Crystals Corporation, a vertically integrated sugar cane company headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida.
In addition to being a leading cane sugar producer, Florida Crystals has established itself as a frontrunner in sustainability. “We’re the first U.S. brand to achieve a unique regenerative organic status, utilizing practices that enhance the soil and surrounding environment,” states Linda Carver, CIO at Florida Crystals. The company boasts the largest Regenerative Organic Certified™ (ROC) farm in the U.S. and is the first sugar brand in the country to receive this esteemed ROC™ designation.
When consumers purchase products from Florida Crystals, they can trust that their choices positively impact the environment, society, and ethical practices. Moreover, the company has integrated sustainability beyond its agricultural methods. Recently, they transitioned their SAP enterprise resource planning systems from an on-premises data center to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which helped reduce carbon emissions and cut costs.
“We consistently aim to be environmentally and socially responsible in our business choices, and moving from a hosted private cloud to the public cloud aligns with this mission,” Carver explains. “AWS’ commitment to sustainability made it an ideal partner. These savings can be redirected to support projects and innovations that benefit our customers, employees, and the broader community through our regenerative farming practices.”
To facilitate its migration to AWS, Florida Crystals enlisted the expertise of Lemongrass, an AWS Partner specializing in the planning, migration, operation, and automation of SAP in the hyperscale cloud. “Choosing AWS and Lemongrass for this solution was a natural decision,” remarks Brian Thompson, VP of ERP Transformation and Data Analytics at Florida Crystals.
Starting in May 2021, Lemongrass collaborated with Florida Crystals to create a tailored environment and Landing Zone on AWS, adhering to best practices for running SAP. This initial phase confirmed the viability of the solution by migrating their development SAP environments to the new setup, according to Thompson. Subsequently, Lemongrass facilitated the migration of the core SAP S/4HANA system from the legacy data center to AWS, completing the transition over a 36-hour weekend to minimize downtime and swiftly restore operations.
Lemongrass also implemented monitoring, backups, and disaster recovery for Florida Crystals on AWS, employing its well-established migration methodology. The company now leverages multiple AWS services, including Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), and CloudEndure.
With SAP operational on AWS, Florida Crystals consolidated its two other SAP environments into a single global instance. “In the past year, we not only migrated away from our previous provider but also merged those three environments into one,” Carver states.
The AWS migration offered Florida Crystals additional benefits, such as enhanced resource capacity and systems to support new business initiatives as needed. The company can now respond more swiftly to occurrences in its production environment, allowing operations to continue with minimal interruption. “Ultimately, this is crucial because we can achieve our service excellence objectives for our end customers,” Thompson says.
For further insights on how AWS and Lemongrass assist Florida Crystals in attaining their business and sustainability ambitions, you can explore this another blog post. To gain more knowledge about sustainability solutions for retail and CPG, visit this authoritative source. Additionally, check out this excellent resource for guidance on navigating similar transitions.
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