Cementos del Norte improves inventory and production costs efficiency and decision-making through RISE with SAP real-time data visibility
Cementos del Norte S.A. (CENOSA), leading company in cement distribution in Honduras. CENOSA began manufacturing in 1957 and their operations are known due to their strict quality controls. With innovative technologies, trained human resources, and a continuous interest in the environment, our customer has a results-oriented organizational culture.
As the company grew, CENOSA faced the challenge of upgrading their on-premise SAP ERP 6.0 EHP 8 system to the latest version of S/4HANA under the RISE model. The main objective was to improve the efficiency of their business processes and prepare for digital transformation.
They approached Avvale based on our solid methodology and quality assurance approach that fully aligned with the challenges ahead them. Additionally, they needed to maintain existing integrations with their internal systems as well as SAP Sales Cloud and SAP BTP implemented previously by us.
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
The Challenge
The migration of the on-premise SAP ECC ERP system to the latest version of the SAP S/4HANA had some challenges since CENOSA needed to minimize system downtime during the migration and ensure data integrity.
Given that the upgrade to S/4HANA was already a complex project, Avvale & CENOSA decided to execute this project under the RISE with SAP model. Furthermore, due to business circumstances, it was necessary to have the system in S/4HANA and migrated within a relatively short period of time, which posed an additional challenging task.
The Approach
To meet the set objective, a sandbox system was set up under an AWS infrastructure managed by Avvale. In this system, comprehensive migration process tests were carried out, and the necessary corrections were implemented to be later applied to CENOSA's SAP systems.
To optimize time and resources in the project, several activities were paused using our methodology. Additionally, two test runs were performed on the AWS sandbox to ensure a successful migration.
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
After successfully implementing and adopting RISE with SAP in just 4 months, CENOSA has built a solid foundation for digital transformation that provides them with the opportunity to implement more innovative solutions that will support future growth and expansion. They now have a unified global platform that supports all their core business processes, accelerates decision-making, and increases real-time data visibility.
Real-time reporting capabilities and visibility into key data, such as inventory and production costs, regardless of location, remain crucial to ensure timely financial closing. Another significant outcome of the S/4HANA implementation was real-time visibility of inventory throughout the organization. Processes that were repetitive and time-consuming for staff have been automated. Now, with a centralized enterprise system accessible to all employees, they can focus on business innovation and future growth, knowing that their infrastructure is prepared for what lies ahead.
