Avvale | Case Study | Centralizing Procurement Operations

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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

In 2020, our client faced a critical challenge following the Apostolic Letter "Norms on transparency, control, and competition in public contracts of the Holy See and Vatican City State". The directive was clear: modernize and digitize procurement operations to ensure transparency and control across the entire Source-to-Pay process. This initiative aimed to streamline operations, particularly benefiting the purchasing office and dicasteries, the primary users of the new platform.

Key challenges included:

Fragmented procurement practices across various Vatican entities;
Lack of centralized oversight;
Complexity in adhering to Vatican regulations.

The Approach

After an in-depth analysis of the client’s business requirements, Avvale applied its strategic expertise to design a comprehensive solution for managing procurement processes across Source to Contract, Procure to Pay, and the Regulated Sector, utilizing SAP Ariba's SaaS solution.

Leveraging 20 years of experience in procurement implementations and advisory services, including nearly 8 years specifically with SAP Ariba solutions, Avvale's team was well-equipped to support the client promptly. This meant understanding both the coverage of required processes according to platform standards and exploring additional features not currently provided. To address the institution’s specific requirements, integrating SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) proved to be the best choice for custom solutions and extensions.

The analysis phase spanned approximately 5 months and involved all relevant business areas, the institution’s procurement office, the Vatican City State's Secretariat for the Economy, and other key entities (such as the 17 Vatican Dicasteries, Pontifical Academies, Commissions, the Secretariat of State, the Swiss Guard, and the Roman Rota). This holistic approach integrated Avvale's in-depth expertise in procurement processes with the industry's best practices, ensuring compliance with complex structural and procedural requirements. Avvale’s iterative course of action continuously refined the solution through client feedback to ensure the solution's ongoing enhancement and sustainability.

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

At the end of this journey, the organization successfully managed its entire procurement process on a single platform, ensuring compliance with current regulations and increasing supplier collaboration. Suppliers utilize the Ariba Network solution as a single access point, entering information for registration and qualification, participating in negotiation events, and receiving transactional documents for the pay cycle.

Avvale's support included change management activities conducted during the final phase of implementation and the hypercare period, immediately achieving a high level of customer adoption. Remarkably, within just over two weeks post-launch, 99% of the institution's entities had embraced the new solution.

Avvale's ongoing support continues to optimize the client’s procurement operations, ensuring sustained success in managing the Holy See's economic resources.

Innovating Tradition: Centralizing Procurement Operations for an Ecclesiastical Financial Authority

The Challenge

The Approach

The Challenge

The Approach

The Impact