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Arco Educação reduces the time it takes to create financial statements by 75%

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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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Arco Educação is a Brazilian company focused on educational solutions from early childhood education to high school, developing content, technology and services for more than 3 million students and almost 9,000 private schools across the country. With growth of more than 35% a year, the company has been expanding its portfolio and territorial reach. Founded in 2006, Arco's mission is to transform the educational ecosystem, delivering more and more value to schools throughout Brazil. 

The Challenge

Arco Educação, a fast-growing startup, quickly made a name for itself in the domestic market. However, this intense pace brought challenges, especially in the structuring of internal processes, directly impacting the closing of accounts and the issuing of financial statements.

With 16 companies in the group and data distributed across 5 different sources, the financial consolidation process became complex and was managed manually using spreadsheets. This scenario highlighted the need for a solution that would not only optimize data governance but also guarantee the security of sensitive information.

Initially, Arco Educação adopted a smaller tool to improve accounting closing, but the solution proved insufficient to deal with the growing volume and complexity, leading the company to look for a more robust and effective alternative. 

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The Approach

Recognizing the need for a tailored and comprehensive solution, Arco turned to Avvale thanks to our deep expertise in financial consolidation and track record in delivering complex, high-stakes implementations. Together, we embarked on a mission to transform Arco’s financial operations with Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close (FCC).

The main challenge was to unify the various data sources in a single repository. With Avvale's support, Arco created a robust staging area, standardizing the chart of accounts and cleaning up the database.

Based on detailed mapping work, all the financial statements and accounting closing processes were technically and functionally designed, resulting in a customized solution that was fully aligned with the business requirements. 

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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 transformation achieved with Avvale’s strategic approach has redefined financial operations at Arco Educação, reducing the time taken to create the budget by up to 75%. This efficiency is due to the centralization of consolidation data in the new tool and the possibility of multiple users working simultaneously on the process - something that was impossible with the previous use of spreadsheets.

In addition, a significant time saving is expected in the creation and revision of reports, since the manual process has been automated. Information governance has also been significantly improved, with greater control over work roles and the ability for employees to access the same database without the need for versioning or the risk of losing information, as well as auditing changes.

The solution has also enabled Arco to identify problems in the integration processes between ERPs that previously went unnoticed, increasing the reliability of the information generated. 

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