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Pharmaceutical Company Fuses Intelligence and Procurement Using SAP Ariba
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
One of the top five pharmaceutical companies in Italy, Alfasigma S.p.A. is a market leader in prescription drugs for many primary care therapeutic areas and offers a range of over the counter products as well. The company’s research and development department is focused on three main therapeutic areas: gastroenterology, vascular disease, and neuroscience disorders.
The Challenge
As part of a wider procurement transformation journey, Alfasigma S.p.A. needed to set up an initiative to digitalize supplier relationship management and simplify procurement processes for indirect spend. The goal was to provide a smart and intuitive purchasing experience that optimizes sourcing and procurement processes in line with procurement best practices. In addition to improving procurement and supply chain, the company sought to create safeguards from increased costs and maverick spending.
The Approach
Implementing native integration of the guided buying capability with SAP Ariba Buying and SAP Ariba Catalog solutions, which provides an intuitive experience that guides employees to preferred buying channels, processes, and policies. As a result, Alfasigma S.p.A. gains deep product knowledge, trusted advice, and outcomes-focused delivery approach.
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
Alfasigma S.p.A. has improved its sourcing practices and reduced maverick spend, resulting in several benefits throughout the procurement areas. Since implementation, they have reduced the execution cycle time for the procurement process and increased process compliance by automating budget-check verification before purchase-request approval. Additionally, the supplier collaboration process has been shortened by digitalizing the exchange of procurement documents.
With the supplier collaboration functionality, the company has been able to minimize stock-out risk and days payable outstanding, enabling suppliers to respond to specific goods and service-delivery requirements. Furthermore, the receiving process timeline and errors have been reduced by configuring the receiving functionality to allow users to initiate the process of good receipts or service-entry sheets. The company now limits maverick spend opportunities and increases procurement compliance by managing catalogs as an approved source of supply.
Lastly, the customer has enhanced tactical sourcing capability and digitalized the procurement team's engagement process, digitalizing supplier relationship management, and simplifying procurement processes with tools to guide people to preferred buying channels.
