ERP case study: How business-IT 'dynamic duo' sparked a transformation

Britt East and Ty Jones say they are opposites in so many ways, but they complement each other as the "dynamic duo" that is marshalling an SAP S/4HANA Cloud ERP deployment through their workplace, John Boos & Co.

Officially, their respective roles at the company were baked in from the start, the division of labor clear, which also meant they weren't in competition. As CIO, East has a traditional IT background and responsibilities. Jones, the vice president of business development, oversees product management, process transformation and related data requirements.

Their creative spark and leadership drive seem to spring from how their differences balance and spur each other on. The two are "polar opposites in every facet of life," East said, but they've chosen to take advantage of their differences instead of being annoyed with each other.

Jones said he is visually oriented, for example, while East is very much a words guy. "Every gap that he has, I fill," he said. "Every gap that I have, he fills."

Their different personalities also help them strike a balance between business and IT requirements.

"Most CIOs, like most CFOs, are pessimistic, dour curmudgeons, and I definitely fit that description," East said. "Ty is basically a golden retriever. All of his brain cells are happy."

But he's quick to point out that both sides are necessary.

"We have a healthy tension," East continued. "Ty is a visionary and a bold leader with a tremendous amount of category experience and a strong vision for all that we could and should be, and I'm a check on that. Part of my role is to make it real and obtainable, to ensure that it's feasible, viable and advisable -- to pour cold water on it when I need to or accelerate it when I need to."

Rapid change amid a long history

The 139-year-old company, based in Effingham, a small city in south-central Illinois, makes butcher blocks, countertops and other workspaces and equipment for commercial and consumer kitchens. It has around 500 employees in several plants across the U.S.

Jones arrived first, in May 2023, having been hired by the company's longtime president, who retired a few months later. The CEO hired shortly after, Damon Childers, had a similar vision and personality to Jones and the same belief in servant leadership, Jones said. "That's the type of leadership team that we wanted to build. Instead of top down, we wanted to move it to bottom up." Several strategic hires in marketing and sales helped to build the new culture and "quash the culture of the past," he said.

Jones hired East a few months later, first as a consultant to help with mapping business processes. Jones had come to realize that no one at John Boos knew the business from end to end because they were so busy with their jobs and hadn't received much help with process governance and control. 

East and Jones say their close working relationship has given the John Boos board the confidence to make a major, multi-year investment in digital transformation. They also see their relationship as a model for others in the company to follow.

Stumbling on inspiration

They didn't set out to be role models for a radically different way of working, East said. Instead, they stumbled on it in the early days after noticing how much fun their banter was "ripping each other to shreds" in text messages at meetings. "We were getting so much done and never felt more alive in our corporate work before," he said.

Then they started connecting the dots. "We reverse engineered it and built a template that we could apply to the staff," East said. "We're using our relationship to transform the culture of the business, to tightly couple business process with information technology."

They believe the transformation will happen one friend at a time, East said. "In the same way that Ty and I have become close as friends and business partners, we are replicating that dynamic at every facet of the organization."

Building trust

When they arrived, the culture at John Boos was one of East Germany-like authoritarian fear and suspicion.

"Our people were told, verbatim, 'Figure it out, or we'll find someone who will. Stay at your desk, do your job, don't ask questions. I don't want to hear about your problems,'" Jones said.

In contrast, the servant leadership philosophy replaces the traditional drive for power and control with a commitment to put the needs of others first and foster their autonomy and growth. The new, more egalitarian culture requires people to be willing to be vulnerable, communicative and transparent, and to hold each other accountable.

Since so much of their relationship is based on complementary traits and personal chemistry, how can a seemingly unique phenomenon ever be replicated?

They said it mostly comes down to modeling the desired behavior, which includes demonstrating vulnerability, showing affection and being willing to dish out and receive good-natured ribbing.

"We're a banter culture, where the banter and the vibe are so important to the success of the work that we do," Jones said. "We push forward with a lot of vulnerability."

He said employees find the two men approachable and willing to talk about difficult topics and listen to them offload after a hard day. It's important for them to know they have a loyal and supportive "ride or die" friend in the office that they can depend on, he said.

Modeling the desired behavior isn't the only approach. East said it's also important to teach the philosophy and demonstrate it with sincerity. "Nobody's going to come into some Midwestern manufacturer of 140 years and trick anybody, believe me," he said.

Using IT to operationalize strategy

East said Jones's important role in senior leadership makes it natural to follow the standard advice about how business and IT should relate to each other: technology decisions should be justified by business reasons and not the other way around.

That means East usually follows Jones's lead, which he considers no disrespect to IT's role. "He's involved in virtually every strategic decision well before it sees the light of day, and so he's uniquely positioned to bring me along to ensure that alignment -- that things can be fully operationalized and considered from every angle," East said.

"Once we deem something worth investigation, then we bring in subject matter experts from around the organization to flush out an opportunity assessment. Ty has recently hired a business process manager and a data manager, so we're building these enduring business capabilities to help operationalize the really great ideas that Ty and others have around the organization to fully vet them, determine prioritization, surface unintended consequences, etc. But it starts with banter and fighting and fist pounding on the desks."

Jones said he typically looks for efficiency opportunities that help employees do their jobs better, which tends to make them happier and treat customers well. "Our customers are going to want to call us more. If they're calling us more, then we will win more jobs," he said.

Those opportunities are so plentiful that the company risks becoming paralyzed. Sequencing them becomes the challenge. "How do we lay this all into a plan so that everything arrives at this state of nirvana at some point in the future?" Jones said.

S/4HANA spurs standardization

The new ERP will not just be about efficiency. Jones said it will also enable new opportunities, such as acquiring fabricators of custom, stainless-steel products to diversify beyond John Boos's traditional high-volume, inline manufacturing. That means modifying the current standard-to-order products for a configure-to-order model.

"The problem is it does not flow naturally through our operating procedures," Jones said. "We could decide to go stand up our own custom shop, but we wouldn't have the skill set to operate it and understand how it's supposed to operate. So we've been out looking for custom shops around the country that we can actually buy and make a part of our portfolio."

John Boos chose S/4HANA out of around a dozen candidates knowing such corporate acquisitions are in its future, according to Jones.

"We had to make sure that it was going to be the right fit for some of those businesses because they're also really small. They're going to be on QuickBooks and probably don't have an ERP that's actually running their operations," he said. They decided S/4HANA offered the most flexibility in adding just the modules needed to integrate an acquired business -- say, for financials.

Much of the work for the S/4HANA implementation has been in organizing business processes and fostering specialization -- new concepts in a company where everyone is used to doing everything. East said the process requires repeated, one-on-one communication with employees to understand what they do and the touch points with the SAP system. 

The company is using Grow with SAP, the ERP vendor's service to help SMBs implement the multitenant SaaS version of S/4HANA Cloud. It is close to completing the Explore phase, which matches the company's business processes with the standard processes and best practices in S/4HANA. But data issues, along with the difficulty of mapping employees' knowledge to the system, not to mention uncovering new opportunities, have put the project a few months behind schedule and the planned April 5, 2027 go-live in doubt.

"Our data is garbage," Jones said. "Data hygiene was never part of the culture of this business." In addition, 120-plus custom programs that were developed to make the company's Aptean on-premises ERP workable will be "blown up," according to Jones.

"It's far more laborious for us to dissect them, analyze them, understand what they're actually doing, and then try and migrate those into an SAP environment, which is frankly impossible because of the public-cloud platform that we decided to purchase. We did that on purpose to limit the customizability of the system. We want to be standard wherever possible, and that is a paradigmatic 180-degree shift from the way we operate today."

Making idealism practical

As the transformation at John Boos continues, multi-year relationships have been secured with several partners and future phases are planned. Further data management steps are under consideration, such as using the SAP system as a data warehouse, adopting the vendor's Business Data Cloud and establishing partnerships with cloud data service providers. Adopting SAP's Business AI platform, Joule AI copilot and WalkMe digital adoption platform are also on the roadmap.

East said he and Jones feel lucky to be part of the company's strong growth and the willingness of its board to invest in its transformation. "It's absolutely a vote of confidence in all of our staff to be able to get this done and streamline the business and position us for radical growth."

How much of that is due to the unusual chemistry of the "Kirk and Spock" duo, to name a famous team they often use to describe it? East summarized why their philosophy seems to work.

"It is hopelessly romantic and will come off as kind of utopian and strange, but it's actually also incredibly practical and pragmatic because we believe that as employees' professional lives improve one day at a time, our customer experience will also improve one day at a time," he said.

"There's still a fair amount of skepticism about what we're building. But with each win, one win at a time, as we gain momentum, as we promote people internally to new roles so they can work in greater alignment with their aspirations, their affinities, their aptitudes, we are slowly winning that trust."

David Essex is an industry editor who creates in-depth content on enterprise applications, emerging technology and market trends for several Informa TechTarget websites.