Avvale | Case Study | Caliente.mx: Intelligent Automation Powering Finance at Full Speed

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.

Caliente.mx is Mexico’s leading online betting and gaming platform, operating in a fast-paced, highly regulated environment where speed and control must coexist. As the company expanded across business units and countries, finance operations became a critical enabler of growth. To keep pace, Caliente partnered with Avvale to reimagine its Accounts Payable function moving from manual, fragmented processes to an intelligent, scalable and future-ready model.

The Challenge

As Caliente grew at full speed across businesses and borders, its finance operations began to feel the strain. Invoice volumes increased, formats diversified, and approvals slowed as teams relied heavily on manual activities and complex cross-department coordination. Each new business unit and regulatory requirement added layers of validation, increasing the risk of errors and delays.

These obstacles made it time consuming for teams like marketing and procurement to engage effectively, while finance struggled to maintain consistent controls. Caliente needed a system that could automate repetitive activities, improve visibility, and facilitate internal cooperation to support ongoing expansion.

The Approach

Avvale supported Caliente automating invoice processing while strengthening collaboration, visibility, and control across teams.

Avvale’s Intelligent AP Solution was implemented leveraging AI, machine learning, and intelligent workflows to automatically capture and validate invoice data, allowing only true exceptions to be forwarded for review. Smart routing rules ensured discrepancies reached the right teams quickly, minimizing delays and keeping approvals on track. The implementation followed clean-core principles and leveraged pre-built accelerators and deployment toolkits, enabling a rapid rollout aligned with Caliente’s operational priorities. Finance and operations teams were onboarded through intuitive dashboards, KPIs, and real-time visibility tools, ensuring adoption and long-term value to business.

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

Caliente’s AP complexity transformed into a measurable business impact: what was once operational complexity now delivers tangible business value. First-time-right invoice posting increased by 90%, average lead times dropped by two days, and payment blocks are now cleared automatically within two days instead of the previous six.

Now at Caliente, the invoices can be posted end-to-end without human intervention, allowing AP teams to move away from manual data entry and focus only on handling exceptions.

The solution delivers consistent compliance across countries and currencies, with taxes being handled accurately and reliably. Finance teams reports a much lighter workload and a smoother end-to-end process, with clear improvements in accuracy, control, and ease of use compared to the previous system.

The modern cloud-based architecture supports multiple attachments and multi-level approvals by cost center, vendor, and company code, ensuring scalability and readiness for future ERP upgrades. As a result, Caliente built strong governance, improved collaboration, and a modern Accounts Payable foundation to support ongoing business growth.