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Cerapedics Savors Support and Visibility with SAP S/4HANA
Cerapedics relieves pain and improves quality of life for people around the world with their proprietary bone graft putty. The biotechnology company’s i-FACTOR Peptide Enhanced Bone Graft is the only biologic bone graft in orthopedics that incorporates a small peptide as an attachment factor to stimulate the natural bone healing process. As the company grew, Cerapedics realized their ERP needed to evolve, too. They approached Avvale, seeking to strengthen the backbone of their enterprise as they digitally transform.
“It wasn’t even close,” Karen Minniear, Cerapedics’ Director of Logistics said. “In our due diligence, we found Avvale was consistently mentioned and referenced. We were told by multiple reputable sources that Avvale was the provider that was best suited to handle implementation of this new solution.”
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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
An outdated ERP system that was supported remotely through a third-party was no longer serving the Cerapedics team. Expecting major growth over the next several years, Cerapedics required a solution that would accommodate their compact IT footprint, enabling scalable, in-house warehouse operations located in the cloud.
Edward Sawyer, Cerapedics’ General Manager, was looking for a solution that improved business processes and also remained in their budget. “For us, [we were looking to improve] almost everything under our operations. It was the finance – that’s always a big area of any ERP system. But for us it was also the manufacturing – being able to track production orders and really being able to understand our costs and our costing. A big area for us was [also] our sales order processing and utilizing [a] system that connects us with our clients so that we could process orders, invoice, and collect. Being funded by venture capital [we needed a] platform that is cost effective.”
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The Approach
Cerapedics partnered with Avvale to implement SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud Edition, allowing the company to digitize their systems and transform with a highly integrated and intelligent Cloud ERP. Touting features such as decision support via natively embedded AI and central business configuration, S/4 Public Cloud became the clear platform of choice for innovation. Leveraging S/4 Public Cloud’s extensibility in conjunction with SAP’s Best Practices principles, our team paved the way for Cerapedics to improve their operations and take advantage of real-time analytics.
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
With S/4HANA Cloud, Cerapedics possesses the stability and functionality to scale with rapid growth. In addition, the company now enjoys easier access to sales order information, real-time analytics for informed decision making, and improved financial reporting – all in an industry-leading solution that has been created specifically for easy adoption.
Apart from the improved overall functionality, one of the major benefits of S/4HANA Cloud was the actual speed of the successful implementation, Sawyer said. “I was amazed at how quickly we were able to implement this platform. We had very limited downtime in terms of reporting; the actual interruption to our business was limited. From starting a 5-month development process to then going live; we were able to close the books within a few weeks.”
