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Âncora Consórcios Reduces Operational Time and Gains Financial Visibility
While they expertly deliver innovation and quality to their customers, Callaway Golf’s previous planning and reporting tool wasn’t making the cut. To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.
Together with Avvale, Callaway Golf successfully implemented SAP Analytics Cloud across their global enterprise in just 6 months. Now, Callaway Golf has a single, consolidated planning solution that has enabled streamlined expense and asset plans so they can focus on what they do best– revolutionizing the sporting world with cutting edge equipment.
Âncora Consórcios was established in 1989 and has its headquarters located in Franca, the countryside of São Paulo. They are considered one of the best administrators in the financial market because of its personalized service and attention to customers, employees, and partners.
The Challenge
Âncora Consórcios had its planned revenue managed by several areas such as product, channel, and representative. Thus, the complexity of operational control was expansive and required focused calculations by the financial department.
Moreover, the decentralization and lack of visibility around payment installments made it difficult to control cash and have accurate financial planning.
Their system, at this time, did not meet the standards for financial planning and monitoring of the realized results. Additionally, they had large volumes of data being managed through spreadsheets, which reduced data accuracy and created inconsistent processes among different departments since there wasn’t a unified data platform.
The Approach
Avvale provided Âncora with a SaaS solution that focused on financial modernization to meet their business needs. This implementation took four months to complete and included various requirements such as open revenue planning by product, sales channel, and representatives. Additionally, it involved planning for general and administrative expenses, tax planning based on assumptions, and projecting DRE until net income on a cash basis. The implementation also included integration and monitoring of data for comparison, KPI calculations for both accomplished and planned goals, and creation of monthly forecast scenarios.
The Challenge
Before integrating SAP Analytics Cloud, Callaway Golf's planning landscape centered around SAP's legacy planning solution, Business Planning and Simulation (BPS). While BPS met Callaway Golf's planning needs for many years, the enterprise began to experience limitations with their old solution:
- Disconnected plans across the board: As Callaway Golf expanded and acquired new brands, planning processes greatly differed across the enterprise with some business units using Excel spreadsheets and others using legacy solutions for planning.
- Outdated planning functionalities: The existing legacy planning solution lacked many modern functionalities. Among them, salary calculations and asset depreciation automation needed improvement. As a result, it became difficult to create detailed and accurate forecasts across the globe.
- Significant IT support: The legacy solution required continuous management from IT to maintain runtime. IT had to carve out a full day every week to manually maintain the solution.
- No single source of truth: Various departments and brands used different data sources, which led to data silos across the organization, making it difficult to gain a clear picture of the enterprise's planned expenses.
- Rigid user interface: Legacy forecasting system was difficult to navigate and lacked working functions and calculations across the board, such as planning on depreciation and existing assets, adding vendors or members on the fly, and breaking down their cost center expense planning forecasts.
The Approach
With Avvale experts on their side, Callaway Golf laid out the following goals for their new planning landscape with SAP Analytics Cloud:
- Crowdsource and consolidate plans across the enterprise to gain a global overview of their planned expenses and expand the input capabilities to each responsible owner.
- Leverage elevated planning functionalities to create faster and more accurate forecast cost center expense and asset reports. The ability to customize calculations enhances and automates the reporting metrics.
- Harness the power of self-service analytics to alleviate IT from the burden of simple maintenance and data entry requests, so they can focus on high-ROI tasks.
- Maximize user-driven admin capabilities to control the management of calculations and forms.
- Create new KPls driven by the business needs.
When SEM-BPS was the center of Callaway Golf's planning landscape, flexibility was a huge factor that was missing. SAP Analytics Cloud contains powerful scenario planning capabilities that help organizations quickly uncover actionable insights to make data-driven decisions. For Callaway Golf, SAP Analytics Cloud's modern planning functionalities provided users with the ability to:
- Add members on the fly
- Plan on existing as well as planned assets and automatically calculate the depreciation of values
- Test "what-if" scenarios for deeper analysis by creating private versions of plans
- Customize the solution based on their current business process
- Perform driver-based calculations
- Empower users to execute end-to-end planning scenarios, without the help of IT
The Impact
The implementation of a financial modernization solution not only met the necessary requirements but also provided several additional benefits. Dashboards were created to analyze financial performance KPI's and enable easy comparisons between scenarios. The solution also offered agility in planning scenario simulations and budget reviews, with automated monthly forecasts. These features provided real-time gains in budget operationalization and allowed for more time to be spent on analytical activities. Data integrity and complete information auditing were ensured throughout the implementation, and access control was established per company, cost center, and sales channel. Overall, the financial modernization solution implemented by Avvale provided Âncora with a comprehensive and efficient financial management system.
“The implementation of Planning was a success from the beginning. From the closing to the go-live everything was done remotely, which brought great flexibility to the agendas and the smooth running of the project. Avvale's consulting and the expertise of the responsible consultant made us achieve exactly what we wanted: agile budget planning with great automation of calculations and the possibility of running Forecast scenarios that encompass the complexity of our business and market changes. This was impossible with the previous tool. In addition, the dedication, engagement, and competence of our Controllership and IT teams had a very positive impact on the success of the project. After go-live, we have already felt a significant improvement in the reliability of information, comparisons between different scenarios, and analysis of indicators that were previously performed manually and were quite burdensome to the operation.”
Michel Leme, Financial Manager of Âncora.
