Mosaic builds a global IT foundation for growth

Getting disparate facets of a global business on the same page — and the same processes — can be a force multiplier. That has been the objective of The Mosaic Company’s global digital transformation, which aims to yield at least three times its investment of $300 million.

CIO Jeff Wysocki has high expectations for this wholesale transformation to the cloud and top SaaS platforms, which was approved by the company board two years ago, just before the CIO joined the company.

Mosaic, an agricultural spinoff from Cargill, started moving 20-year-old applications to the cloud when it moved from Minneapolis to Tampa, Fla., in 2018. But its formal digital transformation, formulated to deliver global visibility and global business processes to its crop nutrition and fertilizer businesses operating in 40 countries, began in earnest 24 months ago.

Now, the $15 billion company is poised to capitalize, thanks to the work of Wysocki, who previously served as CIO at Medtronics for almost a decade, and his IT team. Together they have worked with systems integrators such as Deloitte, as well as SaaS experts from SAP, Salesforce, and Workday, to bring the company’s digital vision to fruition.

Going global

Key components of Mosaic’s transformation include embracing Microsoft Azure and the wholesale update and replacement of nearly every business process. To that end, Wysocki and his team have introduced SAP HANA, Salesforce, and O9’s digital supply chain system into the company’s business stack. They also built an Azure-based data lake to provide global visibility of the company’s data to its 13,000-strong workforce. Previously, each Mosaic location operated its own digital infrastructure.

But, as Wysocki sees it, technology is just one component of the overall transformation, which earned the fertilizer giant a 2024 CIO Award for IT leadership and innovation.

“It’s really a trifecta, an organizational transformation as well as a move to global processes and a technology implementation to harden and implement those organizational and process changes,” he says. “When you do a project like this, we’re truly doing a transformation of all three elements simultaneously.”

Mosaic’s primary footprints are in the US and Canada, but the company, which mines phosphate and potash and collects urea for fertilizer distributed through an international network, operates nine locations in North America and South America, and sells globally. Its crop nutrients and fertilizer, which are critical elements to growing healthy foods, for example, are distributed to farmers in Brazil, China, India, and Peru, the CIO notes.

Deloitte Digital principal Nate Clark, who worked with Mosaic, emphasizes the end-to-end nature of the transformation, from supply chain to sales.

“The Mosaic Company’s digital transformation process entailed a thorough modernization of their technology systems, including the adoption of sophisticated CRM solutions that enhanced operational and customer service capabilities,” Clark says. “This large-scale implementation illustrates an end-to-end transformation, with marked advancements in both supply chain operations and customer engagement.”

Enriching foundation

The blueprint of Mosaic’s Global Digital Acceleration, which recently went live, embodies global alignment, process automation, minimum customization, maximum flexibility, and strong controls and expert knowledge, according to the company. Its Azure data lake, dubbed The Global Mosaic Information Center, unifies sales data globally to facilitate more substantive business analysis and forecasting instead of basic functional reporting out of each location as had been the case previously.

With this foundation in place, Mosaic, though still in its infancy around AI, is now able to integrate AI features into the companywide technologies Wysocki and team have adopted.

For instance, “within SAP’s invoice processing, there’s some AI embedded there so we can process and scan some of those invoices in an automated way,” says Wysocki, who expects to leverage AI and generative AI capabilities in its new SaaS ecosystem as those capabilities come online. Doing so will help Mosaic achieve greater ROI even as it reduces technical debut, the CIO says.

Mosaic is also “standing up” their own “Mosaic AI environment” and is in the process building “very specific AI models,” including one for environmental health and safety but later will be designed into business processes, like the SAP example, Wysocki adds.

Dave McCarthy, a vice president at IDC, points out the core value of the cloud and cloud-based data lakes is that they enable enterprises to create advanced analytics and implement machine learning models and generative AI features that can span the global enterprise.

“Digital transformation projects have always been about creating a data-driven business. Access to real-time data across the business helps leaders make quicker and more accurate decisions,” he says.

“Generative AI takes these concepts to the next level and the initial use cases are all about maximizing efficiency,” McCarthy adds. “For example, optimizing water usage in agriculture is a key metric. Making smarter decisions around water usage can reduce costs, improve product quality, and help preserve natural resources.”

In a recent LinkedIn post, Wysocki elaborated more on the project.

“In less than two years from board approval, to go live with new global processes, operating models, and technologies across Finance, Procurement, Maintenance, Operations, Supply Chain, Commercial (and previously HR) is truly amazing,” he wrote. 

But the work, he added, is by no means over.

“This is not the end but just the beginning,” he wrote when announcing Global Digital Acceleration’s launch. “Today, we take a significant step toward the future of our digital journey and our modernized customer and employee experience.”