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City of Milan – Smart City Platform

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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

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The development of the IoT platform is part of a broader project to develop IT systems supporting the smart city's development. The Municipal Administration recognizes, through Resolution No. 620 of 2020, that: "The city of Milan is experiencing a strong push towards digitization and innovation, promoted by various stakeholders:

  • citizens who prefer digital services, integration with new technologies like mobile devices, and the opportunity to perform operations without visiting offices;
  • businesses that compete to offer innovative services and evolve into new business models;
  • the Municipal Administration, which, in this context, plays two different roles. On the one hand, it is an active provider of digital services to citizens and businesses. On the other hand, it plays a governance role, overseeing public and private initiatives to ensure they develop harmoniously in a structured, coordinated, and interoperable ecosystem.”

In light of this, the Administration has recognized the need to provide a favorable context for entrepreneurial initiatives, facilitating access to the complex data produced by digital services and, more broadly, through the use of services by making available a platform called the "Urban Digital Ecosystem."

The goal is to create an environment characterized by high levels of integration and interoperability of information systems, known as the "Urban Digital Ecosystem".

The Administration is developing the Urban Digital Ecosystem by providing a platform for the real-time publication of information related to its services through programmable application interfaces. The published information is accessible to all users who wish to participate, always respecting a set of rules defined by the Municipality of Milan, which all parties are required to accept before joining.

The information about the territory collected through the IoT platform will be published in the form of APIs on the Urban Digital Ecosystem to provide the city (in its broader sense, not just to the Public Administration) with information about the state of the territory and the services managed by the Municipality of Milan.

This process aims to establish a virtuous mechanism of information use and reuse, which can acquire new and different values for each user. Users could use this information to create new services, digital or otherwise, enriching the city's information assets and the level of knowledge about the city's state in a more precise and timely manner. The benefit for citizens is twofold: the Public Administration will have increasingly detailed and real-time knowledge about the city's service status, enabling the adoption of ever-improving governance models, while private entities and other interested parties can develop new services in the territory, enhancing the offering for citizens themselves.

The Challenge

The Municipality of Milan possesses a vast amount of data stemming from the use of public services such as parking, lighting, or traffic sensors. However, these data are currently dispersed across separate platforms, making them challenging to aggregate and hindering effective data-driven decision-making.
 
The project's objective is to enable the Municipality of Milan and city operators to collect and manage information related to the territory and services, correlate them, and make them available to enhance the portfolio of Smart City services offered to citizens. To achieve this, the combined data collection and a data-driven strategy materialize in the development of a dedicated Open Source IoT platform.
 
Ultimately, an additional challenge of the project is to establish a scalable technology and system that can be easily made available (for reuse) to other public administrations.
 
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The Approach

The project started with an initial phase of assessment and planning, aimed at gathering the necessary information for the migration of data from the IoT systems present in the urban area (use cases). This was followed by a configuration phase of the platform and the development of connectors for integrating IoT sensors in the territory.

Avvale was tasked with designing a reference IoT architecture to which existing use cases would migrate, and to which all new use cases that the Municipality of Milan will need to develop in the future will converge. The project is managed in an agile mode and developed using open-source technologies, prioritizing the migration of the most strategic cases for the governance of the Smart City.

Some of the cases for which data from sensors has been integrated into the platform created by Avvale include:

  • Smart Parking: 40 parking sensors to monitor the occupancy of spaces for disabled people (32 sensors) and spaces dedicated to shared vehicles (8 sensors).
  • Smart Bins: 3 sensors to monitor the fill level of bins dedicated to the collection of used oils (1 sensor) and medications (2 sensors).
  • Intelligent Public Lighting Management: 195 poles with connected and remotely manageable lighting devices to reduce consumption and optimize the service. Additionally, the system is integrated with FAI cameras and sensors to detect pedestrians at crossings, automatically adjusting the brightness of the devices.
  • Video Analysis Solutions: used to detect the abandonment of bulky waste, gatherings, or the flow of bicycles.
  • Sensor System for Hydro-Geological Monitoring of the City: rain gauges to measure river levels entering the city, hydrometers to measure rainfall intensity, and sensors to detect the presence of water in an underpass (selected for experimentation). These sensors collect various data types that, when correlated and compared with weather alerts from the Lombardy Region, allow for indicating a level of risk of hydro-geological instability. Moreover, the platform supports the operational teams in case of emergencies by enabling remote monitoring of the territory.
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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

Thanks to the Smart City project, the Municipality of Milan can now promptly access information to make data-driven decisions, gaining greater awareness of actual situations in monitored areas and streamlining services for citizens.

The data collected by sensors are also stored to enrich the information assets of the City of Milan and enable the creation of more complex use cases and future scenarios. Clear guidelines have been established for the Municipality to share with its suppliers, aiming to align all future Smart City needs towards this solution.

Lastly, by adopting Open Source technologies, the Municipality of Milan can make the solution reusable for other public administrations, ensuring cost-effectiveness and long-term sustainability.

 

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