Endura looks to the Future with SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud for Integrated and Standardized Management
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
For over 50 years, Endura S.p.A. has been involved in the development, production, and sale of active ingredients and synergists for insecticides. The company, headquartered in Italy, is a leader in the chemical sector and the world's primary producer of the well-known synergist Piperonyl Butoxide (PBO). Continuously seeking innovation that embraces circularity, Endura bases its activities on three fundamental pillars: experience, know-how, and specialized human resources.
The Challenge
The exponential growth of Endura, coupled with a marked development trend, posed a crucial challenge for the company: the renewal of its current ERP system. The legacy system, based on a highly customized on-premise solution, entailed significant constraints. Relying heavily on the previous vendor and a small circle of consultants for maintenance restricted its operational flexibility and ability to adapt to changing business needs. Therefore, the company chose to embark on an ambitious digital transformation journey with a dual objective: modernize and innovate the entire group's IT systems and ensure seamless and integrated management across all affiliate companies.
In keeping with its innovative spirit, Endura seized this opportunity to improve its business processes, engaging all business departments from the outset, not just the IT department.
The Approach
In response to the emerging challenges, Endura Group decided to migrate to a new ERP, approaching this transformation by designing a global model and implementing it at Endura S.p.A. Subsequent roll-outs will then follow for other companies within the group.
After a thorough analysis of the company's specific needs, a greenfield implementation of SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud proved to be the optimal choice. As a leader among ERP systems and the most widely utilized in the chemical industry, SAP represents a well-known and reliable system capable of supporting sustainable growth with solidity and continuity over time.
With numerous references on SAP and extensive experience in greenfield projects, Avvale emerged as the ideal partner to guide Endura through this ambitious journey, completed in just nine months. What set us apart from the beginning was a strongly collaborative and results-oriented approach, characteristic of Avvale Pro-Activate's project mode. Throughout the project phases (Pre-sale, Explore, and Realize), various demos were presented to the client, offering real-time insight into the solution and allowing for prompt adjustments if expectations deviated. Additionally, we ensured data migration security with the use of two mock-ups, minimizing the risk of errors.
Previous system customizations were replaced with the appropriate use of SAP best practices, ensuring lower implementation costs, reduced margin of error, and a smoother post-go-live phase in terms of maintenance.
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 the adoption of SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud, Endura has undergone a substantial transformation, achieving an innovative and future-oriented ERP system, fully cloud-based. The globally defined model is intended to become the standard reference, enabling Plug & Play implementation for future initiatives. The application of SAP best practices has allowed for the definition of business process modeling, ensuring flexibility and adequate technological support to optimize business performance. The new ERP has indeed reduced process execution times, contributing to an overall increase in operational efficiency and promoting more sustainable management.
SAP Public Cloud, characterized by recurrent and non-impactful upgrades, will help maintain an updated system, enriching it with new features and ensuring lasting competitiveness in the industry. Thanks to the successful collaboration with Avvale, Endura plans to expand its scope with plant maintenance management on SAP and the implementation of SAP Analytics Cloud for reporting.
The overall goal is to have a single transactional system for the entire group, optimizing intercompany flows and preparing for future market challenges with a strategic and integrated approach.
