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Informed and Sustainable Decision-Making: Avvale's Data Analytics Solution for the Maritime Industry
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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 a global manufacturer and contractor specializing in the interior design of cruise ships and yachts, handling all aspects from new construction to refitting and after-sales services. With a production area exceeding 35,000 sqm, a team of over 800 skilled workers, and more than 300,000 square meters of ships successfully outfitted, the group boasts an extensive experience in the maritime industry.
The Challenge
Our client is a rapidly evolving international group recently involved in M&A operations, making it essential to adopt Data Warehousing, Analytics Platforms, and Business Intelligence solutions. These solutions provide management with adequate tools for monitoring KPIs, particularly related to economic and financial aspects, ranging from individual orders/WBSs to aggregate results by company or the entire group.
Before Avvale’s intervention, the project/order life cycles were monitored based on work progress (SAL) with high complexity management of the passive cycle due to a strong internal fragmentation and the consequent number of documents processed. Project management was limited to one company using SAP, while other group companies relied on separate tools and Excel files, lacking easy access to comprehensive order information and the ability to utilize a Data Visualization tool for analysis and alerts.
To address these challenges, a harmonized data platform and a reporting/dashboarding tool were necessary.
Before Avvale’s intervention, the project/order life cycles were monitored based on work progress (SAL) with high complexity management of the passive cycle due to a strong internal fragmentation and the consequent number of documents processed. Project management was limited to one company using SAP, while other group companies relied on separate tools and Excel files, lacking easy access to comprehensive order information and the ability to utilize a Data Visualization tool for analysis and alerts.
To address these challenges, a harmonized data platform and a reporting/dashboarding tool were necessary.
The Approach
After a thorough assessment phase, where Avvale made a comprehensive analysis of processes, in collaboration with the client, we decided to implement Power BI platform, powered by Microsoft Azure.This new BI platform impacted key functional areas such as project management, order management, and HR, enabling enhanced management control. Avvale's extensive experience in data tracking, recording, and visualization solidified our position as the ideal choice for the project.
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
The client benefits from the finalization and analysis of orders, gaining valuable insights into progress, revenues, and margins across specific analysis dimensions. Reviewing order progress enables analysis of finalized orders, budgeting, variance analysis, and balance sheet creation for each company. The Power BI platform also facilitates monthly report consolidation, historical tracking for analysis and comparison, financial statement reclassifications, and planning, enabling clients to make informed and sustainable business decisions. The solution's technical benefits encompass securing reporting files in a Data Warehouse to replace Excel-based files and gradually integrating source systems into the Data Analytics Platform for all group companies. Through the DAP's integration layer, we automate critical processes reducing manual tasks and enhancing operational efficiency. To ensure long-term circularity and sustainability, we adopt a scalable and cloud-based DAP, enabling seamless integration of additional data sources. User profiling ensures regulated data access, while our reporting and dashboarding tool empowers users to generate reports and conduct ad hoc analyses, fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making.
