Improved Data Platform: Clean Energy Provider Maximizes Data Accuracy and Reliability
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Our client is an Italian-based group engaged in the production of electricity and the delivery of fully sustainable energy services. Its vocation: exclusively generate energy from renewable sources, progressively leading company towards a greener energy transition.
The Challenge
Over time, the company has recognized the need to optimize its data platform and reporting functionalities to boost performance and meet business needs in terms of analysis and data quality.
Specifically, the objectives to be pursued with the support of the Avvale team were:
- automate the report processing to make data analysis more accessible by enabling specific drill-downs and advanced analyses (e.g., by customer segment or margin per customer);
- empower the Sales Division to delve into data concerning the customer journey, aiming to improve commercial, operational, and portfolio effectiveness;
- contribute to ensuring compliance with deadlines for institutional and control reporting.
The Approach
To achieve the set objectives, the Avvale team conducted specific interventions on the AWS-based platform, providing maintenance services to optimize existing functionalities and addressing areas not fully aligned with business requirements. To accomplish this, reverse engineering activities were necessary to deeply understand the architecture of the existing system and implement necessary corrections.
Avvale emerged as the optimal choice for executing the Application Maintenance service, leveraging its extensive experience in the energy and utilities sector, along with top-notch technical expertise in AWS services. Key differentiators encompassed a highly competent team capable of addressing challenges from both technical and functional perspectives, robust technological skills, and strict adherence to the best AWS practices.
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 service provided by Avvale, our client has obtained a high-performing and functional platform, experiencing improvements both in the quality of report processing processes and in the usability of data. The platform is now capable of handling data more efficiently, ensuring a smoother workflow. This has resulted in a reduction of manual activities required for data modification and integration, as well as quick availability of data, leading to a more sustainable use of resources in terms of time and effort.
The optimization of reporting functionality has enabled the generation of reliable and timely data to support business decisions, aligning with Business expectations and fostering greater responsiveness and agility in a highly competitive industry. Finally, Avvale has laid the groundwork to support the company in the future evolution of the Data Platform.
