What happens when a private-equity carve-out meets a heavily customized 20-year ECC system… and leadership decides there is no way back?

In this special Transformation Every Day episode, recorded live as an ASUG / cbs Fireside Chat, I’m joined by Zara Horn, CIO of Current Lighting, and Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG, to unpack one of the most impressive S/4HANA journeys I’ve seen firsthand.

Current Lighting didn’t just migrate.
They executed a full carve-out and S/4HANA transformation on RISE in record time. Five months!!

No 24-month program.
No endless blueprint debates.
No “we’ll fix it later” customization spiral.

Instead:

• A radical commitment to clean core
• A strict “If it doesn’t make money, we don’t build it” rule
• One year of data instead of twenty
• Executive alignment from day one
• Business transformation, not IT modernization

Six months after go-live, the results spoke for themselves:
From incremental improvements to multi-million-dollar value creation cycles every quarter.

We discuss:

– Why legacy customization kills innovation
– How to convince the business to embrace fit-to-standard
– Why partner culture matters more than technical skills
– The real role of change management
– Why speed can be a strategic advantage
– And what’s next: BTP, public cloud, and continuous transformation

This episode is not theory.
It is what happens when leadership aligns, discipline replaces nostalgia, and cloud becomes a business decision — not a technical one.

If you are still debating brownfield vs. greenfield, clean core vs. customization, or whether RISE is “worth it,” this conversation will challenge your assumptions.

Follow Zara Horn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zarahorn/

Follow Geoff Scott here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoff-scott-ugs/

Follow Alexander: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandergreb/
Follow Johannes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johanneslangguth/

Thanks to Steven Spears for lending his voice for our podcast intro.
Theme music by Luis Álvarez a.k.a. Fourth Dogma