Avvale | Case Study | Aeroviaggi develops Collaborative Systems through SAP S/4HANA

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.

Founded in 1973 by Antonio Mangia, Aeroviaggi is one of Italy's leading hotel chains that operates 4-star hotels and resorts located in the top seaside destinations in Sicily and Sardinia. Since July 2021, the Aeroviaggi Spa Group has operated under its global brand, MANGIA'S Resorts & Clubs.

Aeroviaggi has long embraced a vision of sustainable tourism and has undertaken initiatives and concrete actions in favor of the environment. Energy saving, local gastronomy, and respect for the territory are the drivers behind all the group's accommodations.

The Challenge

With its evolution from a small tour operator to a significant player in the hospitality industry, Aeroviaggi felt the need to update its management system to align it with the requirements of the new corporate structure.
With 13 facilities comprising resorts and clubs on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean, over one million guests per year, and more than 1550 employees during peak season, there was a large volume of data being managed with a limited ERP management system that couldn’t support the company's evolution.

The Approach

After a software and partner selection, Aeroviaggi, guided by HIP - Hotel Investment Partner, chose Avvale as a strategic partner to accompany them in implementing their new ERP system: SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud.
The ERP, suitable for managing all core business processes, was implemented following a Greenfield approach, which involved a complete redesign of processes based on SAP's Best Practices.

A harmonized model was thus created to cover different lines of business, such as Tour Operator, Hospitality, and Build IT, with a greater focus on the following business processes: Procure to Pay, Order to Cash, Finance, and Controlling.
By leveraging SAP's Best Practices, AEROVIAGGI was able to benefit from shorter implementation times and achieve value more rapidly.

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 the implementation of SAP S/4HANA, Aeroviaggi has established a strong foundation for the digital transformation of the entire company. They now have a unified platform that supports all major financial and operational processes.
Thanks to the integration with Opera, the software used for reservation management, revenue information is immediately visible in the ERP system.
Operational and financial management data is now easily accessible at both individual property and aggregated levels, providing real-time insights.
Significant benefits have also been achieved regarding sustainability and energy savings by migrating from a physical architecture to the cloud.

Implementing a reliable, certified, and structured ERP allows Aeroviaggi to create collaborative systems along its value chain, integrating all lines of business and stakeholders within its ecosystem. In addition to the beneficial impact and improvement on its internal structure and processes, as well as the extended network of suppliers, this initiative has contributed to a significant enhancement of service towards its customers who use their services. The continuous accessibility of information and real-time analysis of relevant data enables the streamlining of pricing, availability, and discounts, bringing their offerings closer to the actual needs of the customers and the market.