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The Future of Car Sharing: Connected Vehicles for Urban Mobility
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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 offers a free floating car-sharing service that allows users to rent vehicles for short periods of time, typically by the hour, to meet their transportation needs. The service operates through a mobile application, where users can locate and reserve available vehicles, unlock them using the app, and then pay for the duration of usage.
The Challenge
Our client identified the growing demand for flexible transportation options and the changing preferences of consumers towards shared mobility.
With a focus on providing a user-centric, digital-first, and seamless experience, our client embarked on a mission to introduce a solution to urban mobility that was characterized by seamless convenience.
Their goal was to create a digital-first platform that eliminated paperwork, provided instant access, and offered a free-floating experience – ultimately, an experience that customers would enjoy.
The Approach
Our collaboration with our client resulted in the development of a comprehensive digital experience for consumers through a user-friendly website and mobile application.
Our objective was to create a seamless digital-first journey that integrated all aspects of car sharing, from registration and booking to payment and vehicle return. Unlike traditional car-sharing services, the registration process is entirely digital, eliminating the need for paperwork processing. Users can effortlessly complete the registration process, which includes secure credential verification through integration with government agencies.
Through an intuitive mobile application, customers have the convenience of locating the nearest available vehicle using the interactive map. Alternatively, they can simply rent the first vehicle they come across on the street, effortlessly unlocking it with a tap, as if using a remote control. The app also provides detailed information about the booked vehicle, including the associated cost.
At the end of their journey, users have the flexibility to return the vehicle or temporarily park it in any authorized parking area within the service coverage, including designated parking spots.
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
Launched at the end of 2013, the app saw immediate success, with 55,000 customers and over 200,000 rentals within the first three months.
Today, the app serves more than one million customers who have completed more than 29 million rentals since its launch, managing a fleet of over 2,500 vehicles in various cities across Italy.
With a diverse range of transportation options, including compact, cargo and electric vehicle fleet, our client has effectively become a convenient and flexible alternative to both private car ownership and traditional rental services.
