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Davey Bulletin January-February 2026

The Davey Tree Expert Company provides residential and commercial tree service and landscape service throughout North America. Read our Flipbooks for helpful tips and information on proper tree and lawn care.

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13 January/February 2026 | THE DAVEY BULLETIN Q&A: UPDATE ON DAVEY'S BUSINESS SOFTWARE MIGRATION To update readers on Davey's migration to the enterprise resource planning software SAP ® S/4HANA ™ , The Bulletin talked with Davey's Chief Information Officer Tom Countryman and Amanda Holcomb, manager, organizational change management. Q. First, can we remind our readers what the SAP S/4HANA migration is? A. We have used SAP ® business software solutions since introducing it in 1999. In 2021, we started upgrading to SAP S/4HANA. This system will introduce a multitude of enhancements, including commercial project tracking, easier data access, and improved billing support. What we are essentially doing is taking every little piece of data and information that flows through the Davey Company systems, from billing to payroll and human resources records, identifying that information's path in those systems and making sure we've accounted for that data in the new S/4 software. That's no small task. S/4 is the systems backbone of our organization. We run everything on it and through it. It touches all parts of our business. Q. What is the current state of Davey's migration to S/4HANA? A. We continue to steadily work through migrating various parts of the Davey Company from the legacy SAP software onto the new S/4 system. The latest and biggest, good news is we completed the migration of our Eastern Utility services operations, including Wolf Tree, a Davey company. That was a substantial number of employees and financial revenue that transitioned to S/4. By the time people are reading this, in early to mid-February, we will be preparing to transition all Davey Tree Surgery Company operations onto S/4. After the migration of Surgery Company operations is complete, we will begin the final phase, which is migrating Canadian operations, Residential/Commercial services, Commercial Landscape Services, and corporate office/shared services functions. Q. What would be helpful for employees to know about the S/4 migration? A. We are taking great pains to not disrupt the day-to-day lives of our operations teams in the field. We don't want to negatively impact the operations of our folks who are out there serving our clients and employees every day. That's been a huge goal. To do so, the focus of the migration has primarily been on taking a measured approach to transitioning operations onto S/4. Once operations are on board and live on S/4, we can revisit incorporating all the benefits and upgrades S/4 offers that might be applied to further improve company operations. Q. Is there anything else readers should know? A. As a company, we have done a better job of managing this transition compared with the initial SAP implementation in 1999, which encountered a number of challenges. We have worked much more methodically to lessen any negative impact to the business. This is a generational change for the corporation and is software that will run for the next 25+ years. In the future, there should be more incremental updates to this kind of enterprise resource planning software. Your smartphone updates automatically two or three times a month. It won't be that frequent, but software companies are moving toward introducing new functionality and (discontinuing) programs on a smaller, more frequent scale. We want to thank all the teams who have worked so hard on this migration over the past few years and look forward to recognizing them in the future once the project wraps up. YOU SHOULD KNOW Left: Davey Resource Group employees were among the first in the company to transition to the new SAP S/4HANA software. Right: Davey Tree Surgery Company operations will be the next operations group to transition to the S/4 software.

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