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Scalable Flexibility Crafted for Cricut Using AWS Cloud
With over 6.4 million users worldwide, Cricut, Inc. is a household name for crafters. Their creative technology platform inspires members to continuously imagine at-home crafts. Cricut’s mission is to unleash the creative potential of its members with innovations that bring ideas to life in the form of professional, personalized handmade projects. In addition to Cricut’s core offerings, the brand fosters a thriving community of millions of dedicated members.
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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
Cricut and Avvale first worked together when Cricut selected CloudEndure Disaster Recovery (DR), which reduces downtime and data loss by providing fast and reliable recovery of physical, virtual, and cloud-based servers into Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cricut backed up their entire data backup in the cloud without having to invest in a data center. After the DR implementation, Cricut understood and experienced first hand the benefits of having their entire database housed in the cloud. A year after implementation, they began to explore the possibility of migrating all their SAP workloads into AWS Cloud and ultimately asked Avvale to partner once again to steer them towards digital transformation.
The Approach
While Cricut has been using SAP installations since 2009 with little change, their business has substantially changed over the years as they experienced double digit growth each year. “We'd really outgrown our previous installation,” said Tom Patterson, Director of IT. In 2020, they grew their revenue by 36%, bringing their total to $1.3 billion. And in 2021, their online members increased by two million.
Given that their business models have evolved, it was important to have their entire infrastructure in the cloud to take advantage of the flexibility and sustainability that exists in this platform. When migrating to the cloud, Cricut needed to have as little downtime as possible as their customers are world wide and site access is needed 24/7. As a warning to their users, Cricut announced that their site was going to be down for eight hours for maintenance. In the backend, four hours were marked to complete the migration, but the entire transition happened in two hours.
Inside the cloud, Cricut has infrastructure flexibility, eliminating the need to purchase hardware to manage on-premise systems every few years. Given their site usage fluctuates throughout the year, AWS Cloud allows Cricut to size their infrastructure based on current demand. Even more so, they no longer need to internally manage the infrastructure as AWS handles this, which reduces cost for their IT department. Most importantly, their users were not aware of any technical changes that happened. After the migration, customer orders were processed as normal and with no delay under the new infrastructure.
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 Cricut’s entire infrastructure in the cloud, they no longer have to financially plan for hardware to manage on-premises systems and now have the capabilities to scale it to their changing needs. Additionally, they have the confidence in knowing that their disaster recovery plan can be enacted in a matter of minutes so no data is lost or downtime is needed to recover. The flexibility of the cloud sets the foundation for Cricut to upgrade their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Patterson said, “What’s next for us is S/4HANA. We need to upgrade our system, prepare for the future, complete the digital transformation, and we're [now] poised to be able to do that.”
