Branca Group Elevates Controlling Model Achieving Operational Excellence
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Branca International, a distinguished Italian holding company with over 170 years of heritage in the alcoholic beverage industry, has been a cornerstone in the sector since its founding in 1845. Rooted in Milan, the company oversees three spirit entities across Italy, Argentina, and the USA, while also engaging in real estate, cultural initiatives, and financial ventures. Its core mission is to share Italian excellence worldwide while respecting both people and the environment.
The Challenge
Before engaging with Avvale, the Branca Group grappled with significant hurdles within its existing industrial controlling model. The system fell short of providing a precise analysis of both production and purchasing inefficiencies, leading to inaccuracies in the management income statement. This discrepancy affected the reflection of production and purchase prices, impacting the company's financial visibility.
Moreover, the tools supporting operations and controlling failed to provide a comprehensive analysis of the period marginality, posing a challenge for Branca in understanding the broader operational context and making informed decisions.
Recognizing these challenges, Branca sought to review and integrate its current model to align with the evolving organizational structure, aiming for a more detailed and economically competent analysis of inefficiencies.
The Approach
To address the client’s requirements, we activated SAP Material Ledger and Material Ledger Actual Costing, enabling Branca to accurately calculate the actual costs of materials and improve the accuracy of the cost of goods sold and inventory value. This process included updating the effective period price in the material master data, providing a precise foundation for cost analysis.
Conducting a thorough review of the value fields inherited on Tagetik reports revealed the limitations of the existing costing-based configuration. Recognizing these constraints, we focused on seamlessly integrating value fields to facilitate a more detailed analysis of the cost of sales and production variances. Additionally, Tagetik received instructions on implementing new P&L reporting using the recently created value fields.
As a final step, a COPA report was generated to support the analysis of production variances, according to the model shared in the assessment phase.
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 activation of the modules brought about a transformative impact for Branca. The refined Industrial Controlling Model ensures a complete analysis of production and purchasing inefficiencies, enabling precise identification and allocation of resources for responsible financial management.
Improved reporting tools enhance operational efficiency, promoting data-driven resource optimization. Accurate economic accrual of purchase inefficiencies contributes to a more precise management income statement. The integration of value fields and targeted reports elevates Branca's ability to analyze the cost of sales and production variances, providing enhanced visibility into period marginality.
