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ASUG Talks Customer Success Story: Inside Phoenix Global's GROW with SAP Implementation with Jeff Suellentrop

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What exactly does a GROW with SAP project look like?  

ASUG Talks digs deep into this question during a conversation with Jeff Suellentrop, Chief Information & Technology Officer at Phoenix Global, a metals and mining services company. In an effort to jumpstart AI innovation and eliminate technical debt, the enterprise chose GROW with SAP to help facilitate its implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. 

During the discussion, Jeff walks listeners through:  

  •  Why GROW with SAP was the best option for Phoenix Global's digital transformation project and IT ecosystem
  • How the team overcame specific hurdles during the go-live
  • Advice for listeners about to embark on their own GROW with SAP project 

Check out these ASUG resources mentioned in the episode to stay up-to-date on what's happening around the SAP ecosystem:  

UNKNOWN:

Amen.

SPEAKER_01:

From America's SAP customer community, I'm Jim Lichtenwalter, and this is ASIC Talks, a podcast devoted to conversations with innovators, leaders, and changemakers shaping the future of enterprise technology and the SAP ecosystem. This week on the podcast, I'm joined by Jeff Solentrop, Chief Information and Technology Officer at Phoenix Global, a metals and mining services company. The organization recently completed its Grow with SAP journey, leveraging the offering to implement SAP SW S4 HANA Cloud Public Edition, set the stage for AI solutions, and eliminate technical debt. S4 migration is a critical topic among ASAP members, with 47% of respondents to the 2025 Policy SAP Customer Research indicating moving to S4 is a critical focus area for their enterprises this year. Embracing S4 is also a top challenge for organizations, according to 47% of respondents. I sat down with Jeff to talk about Phoenix Global's digital transformation, why Grow was the right option for the organization, and his advice for other companies about to embark on their own SAP S4 HANA journeys. Jeff, thank you so much for joining me today. Welcome to Ace of Talks. I appreciate you hopping on the podcast with me. Oh, thanks for having me. Jeff, to kick things off, I want to talk a little bit about... Phoenix Global's background, the customers you serve. And then can you tell us a little bit about the SAP IT stack that you all have?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, yeah. So Phoenix Global, we're a world leader in metals and mining services. So we operate in our customer steel mills around the globe, about 17 sites around the world, operating heavy equipment and the processing of and remediating slag. We process that and operate lots of almost all the heavy equipment inside of the steel mill. We've been embarked about two years ago on a SAP Grow public cloud implementation, full-stack finance, operations, supply chain, asset management. ProServe. We also have analytics, integration, and planning. So pretty well full end-to-end ERP, not operational with the extent of ProServe and asset management because we use it for maintenance. All of our heavy equipment are in our maintenance shops as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. Was this Phoenix Global's first foray into SAP or were you all a legacy SAP customer before this?

SPEAKER_00:

So we had a legacy application, another ERP system. Phoenix grew quite quickly over time. So it was kind of point in time. It takes quite a bit of time to stand up a new mill. We get all the assets allocated and purchased and get that up and going. So I think, you know, in the previous years until we started this project, I think we spun up eight sites inside of the two years. So we had a little, each site was a little bit unique, was on a legacy ERP, but because they were all built point in time, there was lots of fragmented data and fragmented processes and tools.

SPEAKER_01:

What are some of the factors that spurred you to embark on this growth as a digital transformation project?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we had some overall business challenges. One of the things that we had a new leadership team I was recruited in as well to lead the digital transformation, having done that quite a few times before in other industries. Like I said, we built a lot of the systems and processes built over time. And so it was fragmented. So it took us a long time to close the books. A lot of our operational metrics were looking in the review mirror, 35 to 45 days in some cases. I mean, our business is much more dynamic than that. So things happen, a lot of moving pieces with our customers. And we really, we had a vision from the leadership team and defined some new outcomes and kind of reinvented how we run the business and we had a set of outcomes called, you know, basically activity-based management. So we wanted to get near real-time visibility across the whole entire landscape. And so we took on a digital transformation, which is, you know, we've replaced every single system and process in the company in the last two years. I've continued to deploy to new plants, but we've been live since last August in the single plant and we continue to deploy plants with that new model, not just SAP, but on a Every front, every technology is net new delivering those outcomes. So this was a significant undertaking for you all. Yes, very significant. Obviously, it's one thing to do ERP, but we've done HRS, done how we manage. We've done new safety programs, new safety training tools. We've deployed AI cameras to all of our vehicles. We've deployed tablets. And basically, we've gotten rid of all the paper and pencil kind of tracking of anything. We've digitized everything. And that really goes to our activity-based management model.

SPEAKER_01:

God knows an ERP transformation is difficult and long enough, but you all really sort of, I would, for lack of a better term, it's a real big bang, it sounds like, for you all.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, it's been pretty deliberate. I mean, I think one of the keys is understanding the outcomes with one of the business. I think that's one of the things that we took an advantage of, did this a little bit different. We went with best practices. And so we basically reset and we didn't do a bunch of requirements. We understood our business processes and all the processes we accomplished, our business process master list. And then we said, we're not going to do requirements. We're going to take best practices. I think that's one of the, we'll talk a little bit more about it, but looking at the different ERP solutions, what best practices, and that became the de facto new practice going forward. So we didn't have a lot of discovery. It was more the change management of, you know, from what we used to do to the best practice. And so, I mean, no customization. That really streamlines and speeds the delivery process up and also allowed us to jettison all of our tech debt, our process.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. I want to put a pin in that and sort of hone in a little bit on the tech debt. You know, Jeff, we're recording this a couple of weeks before SAP Sapphire and ASL Daniel Conference, where you were set to present about this customer story. And one of the things is I was combing through all of our presenters that really stuck out to me about Phoenix Global's story that you all are telling is part of this project was to eliminate technical debt that you all had in your IT landscape. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the technical debt that you needed to eliminate and how SAP Solutions helped you accomplish that?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, building those fragmented systems across the time, how they were configured, some were cloud-based, some were local, some were integrated, some were integrated. We had a lot of processes that weren't integrated. So there was manual steps to go from the maintenance system to the ERP or go, you know, the telematic systems weren't integrated. And so they kind of operated on islands. And so we've connected all of that. Right. And so it's all based off best practice business models, all the integrations done there. We've eliminated all those kind of handoff step, manual handoff steps between systems. We've fully integrated that. So we've basically eliminated all the tech debt and also all the process debt because the best practice eliminated the process debt as well. And I think the other piece of it obviously being in Grow, some of the infrastructure pieces and some of the benefits of Grow and public cloud. Yeah, some of the infrastructure management, some of those pieces and then staying latest and greatest. code set with SAP or any ERP, that's also been a big benefit. So it's less investment for maintaining the things that are our core competency and kind of leaving that into SAP and allow us to really focus on business outcomes. It's really streamlined our whole operation.

SPEAKER_01:

You've mentioned the best practices process that you all took for this project. How did you all work to define those best practices? What went into that? What sort of team members were involved in that process? We'd love a little bit of understanding on around that.

SPEAKER_00:

I think having done lots of ERP transformations before and digital transformations before, you start out with understanding and how the systems integrators and how SAP evaluates the scope of a project is a base list of business processes or business process master lists. It's been around for a long time with SAP. There's also academic business process models for industries. So Understanding all the things we do, AP, AR, purchasing, maintenance, all the different, all that list of processes, and then marrying those up and then picking a systems integrator that has a deep understanding of, you know, it's not just one best practice for AR, AP, or purchasing, but understanding the kind of that core scope of those processes, picking the best practices, picking an SI that understands the industry. picking an ERP that has depth. I think that's one of SAP's strong suits is their depth of functionality and best practices. And basically taking those best practices and being fit to standard. We do fit to standard workshops versus requirements. So we show working code day one. We don't build something for months and months and then find out if there's a gap. We show working code day one. We look at how that changes for process, how it changes, what's the big change management, what's going to start, stop, continue. And so we really kind of have working code every single module as we go into it. So having really good list of those core business processes and acquisition or RP phase, we did a good job there. And having a really defined set of outcomes of we want to accomplish what we call activity-based management, but basically real-time visibility. It allowed us to marry, you know, there's thousands of best practices. Pick from the best and deploy those very quickly and tune our business with those best practices.

SPEAKER_01:

Related to this, Jeff, how did Grow with SAP specifically help Phoenix Global as you all sought to eliminate technical debt and then also have this best practice process?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, I think Grow, obviously there's, you know, how Grow is deployed is a little bit different than Rise in not having to invest quite as much in basis and infrastructure, those pieces, some of that plumbing is already there. We understood our our processes and the capabilities of what Grow could deliver. And then having a really good SI that can help us map and deploy our new processes. Grow is a faster path. There's a lot of supporting tools from SAP. We use Preferred Success as an example with our Grow implementation. So we don't have to staff up by as many people as we would if we didn't. We had a traditional private cloud implementation. It's a more cost-effective solution. There's more supporting tools. And it also allows us to be, you know, stay latest and greatest because we have that built into our model as well. So there are no customization standpoints for us to take an upgrade and consume the latest and greatest functionality and evolution of SAP. And Grow has been a very good asset for us.

SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk a little bit now about AI, which is sort of the talk of the town right now. And it definitely will be at Sapphire. You all are embracing AI tools. I'd love to hear a little bit about some of the processes that you're hoping to innovate with AI?

SPEAKER_00:

We had AI in mind when we started. I think one of the things that's underappreciated is traditionally a lot of the AI projects that you see kind of put AI in without the outcomes or the use cases in mind. We had some very distinct use cases because we did a lot of work on our outcomes and what we wanted our business to look like. And traditionally, like I said, we understood our constraints where we had paper and pencil and the data was old and took a long time in the system. But we also, leading into our ERP or I'll say implementation, we did have some data sets around maintenance and all those assets that we have, thousands of assets. And we built a very, very robust AI model that does recommendations around how much equipment we should have on a site, takes into account financials, contract term, our contracts with our customers can be five to 20 years long. And so there's a lot of working pieces from maintenance to duty cycles to SLAs of those particular contracts with the customers. And so that data was quite rich in our legacy systems. That was our first foray into AI. And then it also, we did that right out of the gate to see the power of that. And it also helped us craft how we built out our asset management tools in SAP. So then we've doubled down on that, got circled up other AI models that we're building. I think the one thing that we lead with a use case and an outcome, and then we apply AI to it. So we've used, we've done a couple of different models because we've done best practice and because we've done grow, you know, SAP has just come out with a bunch of new AI models that kind of plug into the different functions. We literally, have 10 use cases and we're doing workshops now on the ones that apply to our business. And basically we don't have to do much data work because the data is already structured. It's all connected in SAP. So we're able to leverage and catapult, you know, our AI value delivery is probably at least cut in half or more because of that. So we're able to take advantage of all the AI development that SAP is doing, but also because we've structured this in a best practice format. We have everything integrated. We have all of our equipment, all of our plants. We have our HR systems. We actually have also deployed a visual AI model that has a real-time AI voice that tells the driver of the heavy equipment if it sees a yawn or drowsy eyes. It tells them with a voice and gives them an alert And then we're able to take that data and we're using that same platform to feed data into SAP and other ways. So we've seen millions of dollars of benefit from our asset algorithm AI. We've seen big double digit improvements in safety with our AI cameras. And we have a roadmap to millions of dollars of savings, some of the new AI use cases. And our barrier entry is significantly less because of how we've built out the system and how we're able to take Everything that SAP is co-developing at the same time, we have no friction that is turning that on because our model is in grow and it's all based on best practice, no customization.

SPEAKER_01:

I love hearing that. I think oftentimes some people, especially as we get into the generative and then now agentic AI conversations, a lot of people are thinking about, oh my gosh, is this going to take my job? And I think the truth is that AI helps enable employees, helps protect employees in a lot of ways. And it sounds like you all are using it in a very thoughtful way to do just that, to further enable your employees as they're operating machinery or working on the ground.

SPEAKER_00:

If you look at some of the research, a lot of people, a lot of the AI Value delivery over the last year has been pretty sparse in quantitative value because a lot of people have either just did AI for AI's sake or focus on pure productivity, which there's some material gains there. But really optimizing and having AI help large material operations around finance, around supply chain. We obviously spend tens of millions of dollars in maintenance. We look at predictive maintenance as an example. In our integration with Grow and our maintenance applications, we also have it with Ariba plugged in. I didn't mention that. We have Ariba as well. So we can punch out to Caterpillar catalogs, order parts. And we went from, in some cases, a maintenance technician can go to the CAT website, order a part, and have that part same day. Our legacy, that could be three days, right? And so you see that almost a 10x improvement on a turnaround, but we're also now with predictive maintenance and AI really owning models there to get ahead of that and be more predictive, avoid emergency fixes and things like that because the data model is already built and we're able to co-develop our pieces that are proprietary to us. but also take advantage of all those pieces. And it's not about taking people's jobs. It's about optimizing. A lot of the things in the steel industry are based off of a lot of travel knowledge, but using data and some of the AI models, we're able to make much stronger decisions and see real tangible feedback on that. So we have that in mind and we have huge benefits and we've just scratched the surface.

SPEAKER_01:

That's so exciting. Speaking of data, I'm interested, how are you all setting a data foundation so that the data that's being leveraged by your AI applications is trustworthy and correct and doesn't necessarily result in any AI hallucinations. I know SAP obviously just announced the business data cloud a couple of weeks ago from this recording. And that is sort of what that is focused on. But we'd love to hear how you all are approaching this and are thinking about approaching in the future.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, no, I think that's one of the pieces is, you know, taking away the error points. I mean, I think one of the challenges if you're coming into a legacy environment, you have tech debt or a process debt, and then you have user data quality problems. Yeah, by doing best practice, by cleansing all the data, really being thoughtful how we built the data model inside of SAP and out. We use SAP Analytics. Everything's integrated. If we could avoid any kind of manual entry, that integration. We've been very thoughtful in cleansing, optimizing that, and then also putting error checks in to ensure data quality going forward. We understand how the model works. We understand the leverage points. And then it's really just building the use cases of, hey, AI can make a better decision here than a person or it can augment a person and really give them a much more complete picture of the solution. So we've basically optimized, minimized the amount of history we've brought over. And any history we did, we've cleansed. We reset the whole data model was completely from scratch. So from the GL, the material master to the product master, we did all best practice there. And so that allows us to have a very, very strong structure that was already pre-architected with best practice from SAP. I think that's an underappreciated piece that a lot of companies are like, well, I do this special. And now you don't. Best practice is better. Anything most people think is special is just tech data process that will slow you down. And so we've basically... We had great sponsorship from the whole executive team. I lead the digital transformation for the executive team. So it's beyond just the CIO role. We have great sponsorship from our CEO, CFO, our COO. We all committed to going to best practice. That's usually the biggest challenge is legacy processes that people have a hard time letting go of.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm really interested, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners are interested, about why Phoenix Global decided to leverage Grow and what factors made that specific offering the right choice for your organization and your landscape.

SPEAKER_00:

Our size and our scale. And I think that's one of the things that we really looked at the, here are all the processes. And I think there's some things in the marketplace. Well, it's a lighter version of SAP versus Rise and some of those things. But we did a lot of due diligence and said, hey, you know, is there any functionality, any module? We don't have this. Yeah, we have ProServe. We have full financials. We have global financials, multi-currency. We have maintenance and asset management with thousands of assets. We have integration with plants and telematics. I wouldn't consider this. We're not at normal order to cash, you know, buying bonds to someplace and shipping them someplace else. We have a fairly robust business process master list. We didn't have to take on a lot of the infrastructure pieces, the implementation methodology and the support that SAP puts behind Grow. Obviously, there's some back-end pieces that we looked at as well, and we did our due diligence there. It was the most cost-effective, especially for how we wanted to do the implementation. It was most cost-effective, gave us all the same functionality. And it was a much more efficient reputation process, support process overall. As you look over

SPEAKER_01:

the

SPEAKER_00:

digital

SPEAKER_01:

transformation as a whole, what were some of the hurdles that you all encountered and how'd you go about overcoming them?

SPEAKER_00:

You know, I mean, I think the biggest piece is always change management training. I mean, everyone always says that, or I like to find that, right? So if you're not spitting 20% of your, your total budget of the project on change management and training, and so it's, We truly do that, and we've spent a lot. We had a lot of resources. It seems trivial to say stop, start, continue, but it's the things that you're going to stop doing that someone might be done for 15 years. It's hard to go work a different way, let alone something that you've done every day for 20 years. You're going to stop doing that completely and do something different. We have admin that you know, stop their job completely and now work on master data setup and things like that that are more critical to SAP. So doing that training, we have obviously a very large base of folks that work in the equipment. And so we have a very large, almost 2,000 people there, training them on their job, making their job easier and giving them better data. I think that's, it's always the challenge. Obviously, integration, one of the things, obviously, as we integrate the plants and ad scales and telematics, Those are somewhat out of our control. And so making sure you plan well enough in advance to have the cabling and the infrastructure set up to those integrations, especially when you think about a steel mill that's hundreds to thousands of acres, connectivity, how you get that data, prepping and planning for those integrations, and then always data cleansing. And data conversion. I think those are always the typical answers from any kind of large scale implementation. The biggest one that I think we underappreciate or under budget for is the change management, especially doing best practice where we said, we don't really care how you're doing it today. We're going to best practice. And we have a process to say, hey, someone wants to dig in on that. We compare best practice to the legacy way. Standing here today, best practice hasn't lost competition

SPEAKER_01:

versus the legacy process. Well, you spend all this money and you spend all this time to implement new solutions, implement a new ERP system. And then your end users go back to try and do things the way they were. And they're not driving innovation. They're not using it how it should be intended. And so I agree with her. That must be the worst case scenario. So it's so important to enable end users and ensure that they're successful with new solutions.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think one of the things I didn't mention is understanding the outcome. The outcomes we define, you couldn't get there with legacy systems, right? And so they're quantifiable, measurable. Every executive leader has defined outcomes, business outcomes. In plain business English, nothing to do with technology. And we anchor to that every kickoff, every meeting we have, every diploma we do. We kind of paint the picture of those outcomes and why we're doing this so everyone understands top to bottom why we're doing these outcomes, how it affects them. And we spend a lot of time communicating. We have lots of different levels of communication of whether it's a loader operator or a director of supply chain. All those outcomes, they understand those impacts. And I think we have a very clear definition of what those outcomes are. And we reiterate that over and over again. And then we measure delivery.

SPEAKER_01:

Jeff, last question for you. What advice do you have for other enterprises that are either considering a growth SAP digital transformation or about to embark on their own journey?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, I can't stress enough the outcome point and don't overlook class of practice. I think that's a People kind of talk about it. Some people might understand it. But I think understanding the capabilities and what you want to get out of a transformation, having a clear vision of that, and then picking the right systems integrator. I think that's probably the most important point. I've had the opportunity to work across all the big ERPs and deploying. The single most important thing is picking that partner. It's truly a partner you spend a lot of time with, making a lot of tough decisions that will hold you accountable and you am accountable. We don't want someone that's just a yes-man. person, especially when you're doing best practice, right? And especially, you know, a lot of people say, well, I don't want to do any customization. Push comes to show. The SI needs to push back and say that there is a better way to do this or you need to change the business process. You know, having that good partner that has its steep knowledge of the application, especially with the grill implementation has done grill before that. That's how you can get to your, your key business outcomes with a great SI and doing the due diligence of what your scope is out of the gate.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, Jeff, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate you sharing your insights and congratulations on a successful digital transformation and go live.

SPEAKER_00:

I appreciate the time and enjoyed having the conversation. And I say, I always say digital is a journey. So we're continuing to iterate. So that's great. Thanks,

SPEAKER_01:

Jeff. Thank you. We are only a couple of weeks away from SAP Sapphire and ASUG Annual Conference. The event is sure to be full of announcements impacting and benefiting all SAP customers. Stay tuned for an exciting lineup of ASUG Talks episodes coming out of that event. At the beginning of the episode, I mentioned the 2025 ASUG Policy to SAP Customer Research. The annual project provides an excellent look at the focuses and challenges reported by members of the ASUG community. Broadly speaking, the top focus areas identified by respondents were and moving to SAP S4 HANA, integration between SAP and non-SAP systems, and integration within SAP systems. Top challenges included budgeting, master data maintenance and governance, and moving to SAP S4 HANA. Be sure to check out that full research report and other resources, including a podcast episode featuring insights and takeaways from ASUG CEO and Chief Community Champion Jeff Scott and ASUG Research Director Marissa Gilbert. Make sure you also tune in to last week's episode of ASUG Talks, where Jeff Scott interviewed Andre Becker For ASUG, I'm Jim Lichtenwalter. Thanks for listening.