Boosting Efficiency: Central American Automotive Leader Cuts SAP Database Storage by 50%
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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 is a pioneering force in the automotive sector across Central America, committed to excellence and customer satisfaction. Offering a wide array of solutions from vehicle sales to maintenance and financing, the company represents the most renowned vehicle brands in countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica.
The Challenge
Seeking to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve system performance, our client faced significant challenges due to the high volume of data generated by its SAP ERP system. The complexities of managing this data posed obstacles to their operations and hindered their ability to innovate and grow.
The Approach
Avvale devised a comprehensive SAP data archiving strategy tailored to address the client's specific challenges effectively. By implementing strategic archiving measures Avvale aimed to control data growth, optimize resources, improve memory capacity, enhance system performance, reduce storage requirements, and pave the way for a seamless transition to SAP S/4HANA in the future.
Avvale helped the client reduce costs associated with technological resources, enhance system response times, and streamline backup management processes.
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
Our client gained full control over database growth, recovering nearly 1 TB of storage and 600 GB of memory. The implementation of SAP data archiving led to a 50% reduction in the client's database storage requirements, resulting in substantial cost savings and improved system responsiveness. With Avvale's support, the client not only addressed immediate challenges but also established a foundation for sustainable growth and innovation in their operations.
