Episode 28: RISE in Record Time: How Current Lighting Pulled Off the “Impossible” S/4HANA Move - Zara Horn & Geoff Scott

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 modernizationSix 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 transformationThis 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