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From Fragmentation to Integration: Berlin Packaging's Journey towards Unified Financial Management

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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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Berlin Packaging is reshaping the packaging industry with its innovative approach. As the world's largest Hybrid Packaging Supplier®, they go beyond containers and closures, seeking to redefine the entire packaging experience. From warehousing and logistics to quality assurance, financing, and consulting services, Berlin Packaging delivers an integrated experience.

The Challenge

“Before implementing OneStream, we used obsolete systems and very manual processes for the consolidation and financial reporting at the Berlin Packaging Group. With the solid organic and inorganic growth of the Group in the last two years, this process was no longer sustainable, and we decided to switch to OneStream.”

– Roberta Ripanti, Director, EMEA Accounting, Tax & Consolidation Manager, Berlin Packaging


Berlin Packaging faced significant challenges stemming from a fragmented ERP landscape across its acquired legal entities. The consolidation process mainly relied on manual customization within AS/400, coupled with Excel® outputs, leading to cumbersome procedures prone to errors. Reporting was primarily manual, with financial statement notes handled offline in Word, intensifying reconciliation challenges and the risk of inaccuracies.

Consequently, Berlin Packaging required:

  • Process and system enhancements across all operations to enhance efficiency.
  • Integration of disparate ERP data into a unified environment.
  • Consolidation process management compliant with both Italian GAAP (ITA GAAP) and US GAAP (US GAAP).
  • Streamlined management and statutory reporting.
  • Automation and integration of notes tables.

In essence, Berlin Packaging sought to minimize manual efforts, ensuring consistent, real-time data updates directly from the system to drive operational excellence.

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The Approach

Avvale’s team collaborated closely with Berlin Packaging to understand its needs and develop a tailored solution using OneStream's Intelligent Finance platform. With decades of expertise in Corporate Performance Management and extensive training on OneStream, we provided the necessary support from the design phase through implementation and ongoing maintenance.

Key to the project's success was our ability to customize the solution to meet Berlin Packaging's specific requirements, including compliance with both ITA GAAP and US GAAP accounting standards. This level of customization was particularly crucial for the European branch, which had to navigate complex regulatory landscapes.

Our strategy involved harnessing OneStream's horizontal extensibility to manage actual and planning data, as well as ITA GAAP and US GAAP rollups. This approach empowered Berlin Packaging to uphold consistent data definitions and flexibility across various organizational levels and processes.

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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

Since the new implementation, Berlin Packaging has undergone a significant transformation, marked by streamlined processes and enhanced efficiency. The consolidated budget process has been simplified, and consolidated financial statements now seamlessly comply with both ITA GAAP and US GAAP. OneStream's extensibility feature has provided unparalleled flexibility in dimension expansion, catering to diverse reporting needs across different subsidiaries. Automation of notes to financial statements through Sturnis365 has further enhanced efficiency and accuracy, promoting real-time data integration and collaboration while minimizing errors.
By reducing reliance on manual processes and promoting real-time data integration the company minimizes errors and maximizes resource utilization, driving towards a more sustainable future.

👉  If you want to know more about this case and deep dive into the OneStream solution, visit this link.

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