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Alpitour World: Low-Code as the Catalyst of Digital Transformation

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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

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Alpitour World, a European leader in the tourism sector operating in over 15 countries, stands out for its continuous innovation. With five operational divisions spanning from tour operations to hospitality, the company has established itself through strategic investments in technology. By investing over 20 million euros in technological solutions, Alpitour World launched the inNOVA project, which led to the creation of a Center of Excellence (CoE) dedicated to artificial intelligence, automation, and low-code, with the goal of optimizing internal processes and resources.

The Challenge

With a diverse structure and complex operations, Alpitour World faced significant challenges in managing its business processes. In particular, the existing BPM platform was rigid and followed a waterfall development approach, which failed to meet the dynamic demands of an ever-evolving market. Development times were too long, and the system’s limited capabilities negatively impacted operational agility.

This situation became particularly critical in two areas: the management of contracts by the Groups Office and the communication of operational changes to flights. In the first case, the use of traditional tools like emails and manual documents led to inefficiencies, high costs, and unsustainable processing times. The complexity of the process resulted in slow operations, hindering the office's ability to handle a growing volume of contracts. At the same time, the communication of operational flight changes required a more structured process. The lack of a clear and centralized workflow increased the risk of errors, reduced transparency between teams, and slowed response times to changes.

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The Approach

With over 30,000 vacation quotes generated daily and a continuously growing volume of activities, it became essential to adopt a platform capable of standardizing procedures, improving collaboration, and accelerating processes. Avvale recognized this need and proposed Mendix as an innovative solution: a low-code development platform designed to simplify and automate key processes, known for its flexibility, intuitive design, and easy integration with technologies like DocuSign for digital signatures.

Thanks to a highly complex Proof of Concept (PoC) developed by Avvale’s team in just one month, Alpitour World was able to test the platform’s potential. Mendix quickly demonstrated its ability to meet business needs, integrating flexibly into existing workflows and significantly reducing implementation times. The choice of Mendix enabled the rapid development of applications through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, minimizing the need for manual coding. The management time for complex processes was further reduced thanks to a visual approach and the use of predefined templates, making technology adoption more agile. The integration with APIs and the availability of numerous native connectors facilitated seamless connections with existing systems, ensuring flexibility and scalability.

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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 adoption of Mendix has transformed Alpitour World’s operational processes, delivering concrete and measurable results. In contract management, processing times were reduced by 50%, while contract costs decreased by 36%. The Groups Office’s capacity increased, with a 19% rise in contracts handled annually.

For managing operational changes, the platform ensured faster and more effective communication, drastically reducing errors thanks to standardized and transparent workflows.

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