Presented by SAPTen years ago, Western Sugar made a decision that would prove prescient: move from on-premise SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. At the time, artificial intelligence wasn’t a priority on most roadmaps. The company was simply trying to escape what Director of Corporate Controlling, Richard Caluori, calls “a trainwreck:” a heavily customized ERP system so laden with custom ABAP code that it had become unupgradable.Today, that early cloud adoption is proving to be the foundation for Western Sugar’s AI transformation. As SAP accelerates its rollout of business AI capabilities across finance, supply chain, HR, and more, Western Sugar finds itself uniquely positioned to take advantage of the technology.”We didn’t move to the cloud thinking about AI,” Caluori says. “But that decision to embrace clean core principles and standardized processes turned out to be exactly what we needed when AI capabilities became available. The clean data, the standardized workflows, the disciplined processes, all of that groundwork we laid for basic operational reasons is now the foundation that makes AI work. We were ready without even knowing it.”Building AI readiness with a clean core ERP foundationWestern Sugar’s journey began with a familiar enterprise problem: technical debt. Years of on-premise customization had created a system that was nearly impossible to maintain or upgrade. “Because we were on premise, we could do our own coding in ABAP, and over the years we created such a mess with our internal coding that the software was no longer upgradable,” Caluori explains. “The immediate benefits of moving to public cloud were clear: reduce …
