As a global leader in the lifting and securement industry, Kito Crosby manufactures and distributes products like critical lifting and rigging solutions, specialized hardware, cranes, and electric hoists. Headquartered in Richardson, Texas, with facilities worldwide, its mission focuses on safety, innovation, and global impact.

With a diverse portfolio of brands—Kito, Crosby, Harrington, Gunnebo Industries, Peerless, and eepos—the company has experienced rapid growth, scaling its business from millions to billions in revenue. But the number of acquisitions left the company with a fragmented IT landscape of outdated, unsupported, and unscalable systems.

To establish a unified digital core and standardize processes, Kito Crosby embarked on a RISE with SAP journey, implementing SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition to achieve its long-term single global instance strategy.

A winning strategy

Kito Crosby chose a greenfield, clean core strategy to eliminate the existing fragmentation and enable long-term scalability, Johnson Lai, Chief Digital Transformation Officer and Chief Information Officer, shared in an interview. “In the past, we did not integrate our ERP systems, and this left our IT landscape very fragmented and limited our business process capabilities,” he said. “Therefore, we wanted to refresh all of our ERP systems and really lay down a greenfield start that we can begin to create a transformational change for the entire company.”

Selecting a greenfield and clean core approach—basically standing up an entirely new system that prioritizes standard functionalities over customizations—was key to remedying Kito Crosby’s current technology landscape, so that processes like order to cash, accounting, manufacturing, and shipping could be integrated. This approach also allowed the company to take a close look at core processes and streamline operations, especially in warehouse management and S&OP, Lai said.

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Considering the project scope, Kito Crosby did not have the internal talent needed to stand up the servers and infrastructure, so it decided to move forward with RISE with SAP and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. “SAP comes with a lot of great stuff, and we wanted to take advantage of that,” Lai said.

The company began the transformation in North America, as that is its largest market and therefore posed the greatest risk in operating on a legacy, unsupported ERP system.

Never underestimate change management

While Lai shared that employees were motivated and excited to get started initially, the enormity of the project quickly became overwhelming.

Ironically, many wanted to customize the new SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution to act like the legacy tech. “Everyone agrees to the clean core approach until it’s their turn to look at their function, at which point they want customization. There was a piece of resistance to using ‘vanilla’ functionality,” Lai said. “Once we showed people live demos with their own data, that’s when the change resistance started to decrease,” he added.

In IT specifically, there was a strong desire to build and run their own infrastructure and servers rather than have another company step in. A sense of ownership and accountability is important, Lai said, but ultimately Kito Crosby’s need to get off the legacy system in North America quickly made it necessary to partner with SAP. And it was the right move: “Now some of the folks who questioned why we outsourced some of that to SAP are our biggest champions…We find working with the SAP team is no different than working with ourselves.”

For companies with digital transformation projects on the horizon, Lai cautions to “never underestimate the change impact that employees face.” Projects of a global scale require planning on all fronts, including allocating time for employees and business leaders to get on board.

Lessons learned and benefits gained

The ERP system revamp delivered measurable business value to Kito Crosby, including improved customer service, stronger inventory control, and more efficient manufacturing and warehouse operations. Notably, the business process improvements and enhanced system functionality drove Kito Crosby’s on-time delivery to its highest levels in more than 10 years.

“We see that benefit across the globe and we’re excited about taking what we’ve done in North America throughout the entire world, consolidating all those little ERPs that are outdated and unsupported into SAP to get to that single global instance,” Lai said. Since going live on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and fully embracing its native capabilities, Kito Crosby has unlocked measurable business value and operational excellence. The transformation has driven strong performance gains across critical KPIs, including higher customer on‑time delivery, meaningful reductions in back orders, improved inventory accuracy, and accelerated intercompany processing.

At the same time, warehouse operations are setting new benchmarks for efficiency, achieving record volumes for receiving and put‑away, replenishment, and shipping. These results have been delivered safely, with zero injuries and fewer resources.

To the cloud—and beyond

Following its recent acquisition by leading worldwide designer, manufacturer, and marketer of intelligent motion solutions Columbus McKinnon, Kito Crosby is continuing to build on its strong digital foundation.

“Because we started with a greenfield and kept a clean core as much as possible, we feel like the upgrades will go even faster and with less effort,” Lai said. “We want to get to the latest [SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition] version so we can take advantage of the AI capabilities of Joule.”

Next on the ERP systems consolidation docket: the SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) 6.0 system in Europe.

“This is just one example of how our IT team is empowering the broader organization to further delight our customers and end user,” Lai shared. “As we continue to scale our business, we expect even greater returns as we further capitalize on the technology, expanded capabilities, and AI tools within our SAP landscape.”

Gillian Hixson is an integrated communications specialist at SAP.

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