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Italian Chemical Company Achieves Process Harmonization with SAP S/4HANA
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Founded in 1941, our client is one of the most active Italian chemical companies on the international market, whose core business focuses on three macro business areas: Chemicals, High-Performance Polymers, and Advanced Textile Solutions.
The Challenge
Our client wanted to initiate a digital transformation project for the entire Advanced Textile Solutions (ATS) business area, a leading player in the synthetic fibers sector.
Recognizing the industry's evolving landscape, they aimed to harness the power of technology to optimize their operations and processes by establishing standardized models based on both the industry’s and the specific group's best practices. By doing so, they sought to recover valuable efficiencies in management and control activities at the group level. A key focus was to simplify and harmonize the application map across the entire business area, paving the way for streamlined and coherent processes.
Recognizing the industry's evolving landscape, they aimed to harness the power of technology to optimize their operations and processes by establishing standardized models based on both the industry’s and the specific group's best practices. By doing so, they sought to recover valuable efficiencies in management and control activities at the group level. A key focus was to simplify and harmonize the application map across the entire business area, paving the way for streamlined and coherent processes.
The Approach
In response to the client’s needs, Avvale undertook a Greenfield project in 2022 to implement a new SAP S/4HANA ERP system throughout the specific ATS business area.
Given the large number of companies within this area, together with the client, we decided to design an evolutionary roadmap, strategically starting with two group companies in close collaboration.
The aim was to create a global template, considering the seamless integration of the new ERP system with the group’s existing legacy software, for the integrated management of managerial and logistic processes within the ATS business area.
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
This innovative ERP solution has delivered remarkable benefits to our client, enhancing both operational efficiency and sustainability. By defining a global template built on the group's best practices, they achieved an integrated and homogeneous management of the group’s processes, enabling a cohesive and harmonized implementation strategy for future digitalization efforts across the greater organization. The implementation of SAP S/4HANA goes beyond operational efficiency: it actively promotes sustainability throughout the organization. By optimizing processes, our client can reduce waste and streamline operations, ensuring that every resource is used at its full potential.
