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C.O.B.O. S.p.A Improves Customer Experience Omnichannel Transformation
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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 1949, C.O.B.O. S.p.A. is a worldwide leader in design, development, and production of electronic components, seats, steering wheels, and fully assembled column kits for industrial and agricultural vehicles and machines.
The Challenge
C.O.B.O. S.p.A. required a total transformation within the traditional spare parts sales channel and tapped Avvale to create a personalized "Point of Experience" tailored to the unique needs of each customer. Achieving this goal required an internal change in two processes.
First, the company needed to increase efficiency by avoiding manual input from the back-office and acquiring sales orders directly from both after-market and distribution markets.
Second, it needed to reduce the order management cost by simplifying the overall purchase process, which was achieved by implementing a leaner method for the current order fulfillment process. Previously, the order entry activities within the company management system were manual, and there was no communication with C.O.B.O. S.p.A. of the relevant information. Additionally, care and external communication were managed only by phone or email. These operational inefficiencies resulted in an increasing loss of time and a consequent decrease of margins.
The Approach
After running a deep process analysis to fully understand C.O.B.O. S.p.A.’s procedures and relations between the stakeholders of the value chain, Avvale created a fully integrated implementation of the B2B eCommerce platform and designed an intuitive software that allows their customers and sales agents to directly buy multi-categories’ spare parts through a simple search functionality, thus simplifying the purchasing process.
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
By introducing a cloud-native B2B eCommerce platform, C.O.B.O. S.p.A. experienced several benefits. First, the company was able to transform the customer experience by opening a new channel that allowed for the development of a simple and intuitive online shopping experience for B2B customers and their sales agents.
Second, the activation of the Lookcast application significantly improved the marketing department's daily tasks, reducing time and costs while providing high-quality printed and digital catalogs.
Third, through implementing personalized dashboards, the company was able to manage both internal and external sales agents with their commissions, while simplifying product management by enhancing the collaboration workflow between different business functions.
Overall, the project optimized, simplified, and improved the relationship between customers, internal selling forces, and the purchasing platform. This, in turn, helped to better connect products to users, increase value, and generate higher revenues.
