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World Leader in Construction Optimizes Accounts Payable Process for Over 1 Million Invoices in Latin America
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Our client, a global leader in construction materials, is dedicated to advancing sustainable construction practices worldwide. With a commitment to reducing carbon footprints and enhancing resource efficiency, they aim to shape a more sustainable future for generations to come. Operating in numerous countries, they boast a vast network of production plants, distribution centers, and commercial offices.
The Challenge
As part of the digital growth strategy and migration to SAP S/4HANA, our client embarked on updating their SAP ERP system in Latin America. However, they faced significant operational inefficiencies due to operating on an outdated SAP Invoice Management by OpenText version 7.0 SP0, which was no longer supported by the manufacturer.
The challenge lay in updating the SAP Invoice Management by OpenText solution, critical for the Accounts Payable area, to leverage new functionalities for improved response times and operations. This involved technically and functionally adjusting processes across 8 countries in the region: Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Colombia. Rigorous, efficient, and centralized testing was necessary to minimize the impact on management, particularly given the reliance on a robust supplier model fundamental to their business.
The Approach
Avvale, as the strategic ally, undertook the technical migration of the solution to version 7.5 SP11 and subsequently to the desired version of VIM 7.6 SP2.
This involved comprehensive regression tests to verify the proper functioning of the applications in their new version. We updated several embedded components such as SAP Archiving and Document Access, Employee File Management, and the components necessary for the optimal operation of the Accounts Payable process, ensuring system stability and homogeneity throughout the project.
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
With Avvale's SAP Invoice Management update, our client now enjoys an efficient Accounts Payable process operation across Latin America, along with continuous support and timely response from SAP and OpenText. Additionally, with the capability to process over 100,000 monthly invoices across the 8 countries of the region, the company has achieved efficiency, centralization, and enhanced financial control. Thus, it continues to comprehensively optimize the accounts payable process, aligning with the business needs in the construction industry and strengthening vendor relationships throughout the region.
The automation of accounts payable processes not only enhances efficiency and accuracy but also significantly contributes to environmental sustainability: reduction in paper usage, efficient resource utilization, and fostering relationships with sustainable suppliers.
