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Baillie Lumber Transforms Business Operations by Leveraging the Power of Data
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Baillie Lumber, one of North America's largest hardwood lumber manufacturers has long been known for its commitment to quality and innovation. With a rich history spanning generations, Baillie Lumber has established itself as a global leader in providing high-quality lumber products.
The Challenge
When Baillie Lumber approached Avvale, they were grappling with significant challenges in measuring inventory turns at a detailed level, tracking months' supply of products, and scaling their reporting capabilities to meet executive management needs. This gap in data integration and reporting not only hampered inventory management effectiveness but also hindered their ability to accurately price products and gain a comprehensive understanding of overall operations. As a result, Baillie Lumber faced increased reliance on external reporting platforms, which further fragmented their data sources. This inability to consolidate disparate data into user-friendly formats severely limited their ability to fully leverage their investment in SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP infrastructure.
The Approach
Avvale embarked on a collaborative journey with Baillie Lumber, recognizing the transformative potential of modern data platforms in overcoming their operational challenges. Understanding the significance of a well-structured data tool, Avvale prioritized the implementation of SAP Datasphere to streamline Baillie's data management processes. This modern platform offered deep integration with SAP S/4HANA and other systems, empowering Baillie with intuitive modeling capabilities and enhanced scalability while minimizing total cost of ownership.
Moreover, Avvale emphasized the inherent benefits of data analytics for Baillie Lumber. By harnessing the power of data analytics, Baillie gained invaluable insights into their operations, enabling informed decision-making and strategic planning. With real-time access to actionable insights, Baillie could optimize inventory management, pricing strategies, and overall operational efficiency.
Furthermore, Avvale's dedication to sustainability and circularity was appreciated by Baillie and deeply ingrained in the project's approach. The implementation of SAP Datasphere facilitated the consolidation of data sources, reducing unnecessary resource consumption and promoting efficient utilization allowing them to align their transformation journey with sustainable business practices which are very important in the hardwood lumber industry.
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 implementation of a modern data platform has revolutionized Baillie Lumber's operations, providing real-time reports and insights that drive strategic decision-making. SAP Datasphere empowers leaders with deep insights powered by real-time data, enabling them to make informed choices that optimize inventory management, pricing strategies, and overall operational efficiency. Additionally, the robust data fabric facilitates the efficient handling of complex ad-hoc queries, empowering the team to extract actionable insights with ease. Moreover, by leveraging SAP Datasphere as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Baillie Lumber eliminates the need for infrastructure and application upgrades, ensuring seamless operations and allowing the focus to remain on strategic objectives rather than technological maintenance.
