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The Intelligent Repository: FARO’s AI Virtual Assistant Redefines Document 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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
FARO is a historic Italian brand specializing in advanced lighting solutions for the dental sector. With a strong focus on precision and innovation, FARO has been serving dental professionals for decades. The company continuously seeks technological advancements to improve its internal processes and customer experience.
The Challenge
Every day, FARO employees navigated an overwhelming volume of documents, from track changes to forms, production orders, and inbound material records. Information was scattered, workflows were burdened by manual processes, resulting in lost time and inefficiencies. Beyond just improving accessibility, the company needed a solution capable of automating repetitive tasks, streamlining decision-making, and enhance collaboration across teams.
The challenge was about transforming the way FARO interacted with its data. The company required a solution that could intelligently process and summarize documents, extract key insights, assist in compliance and reporting, and provide contextual recommendations - all while ensuring data security and accessibility based on user roles.
The Approach
The key was to harness AI in an intuitive way - empowering employees rather than overwhelming them with complexity. To achieve this, Avvale introduced a Virtual Assistant powered by Microsoft Azure’s "On Your Data" technology, a sophisticated AI-driven system that combined Vector Search for rapid data retrieval with a Large Language Model (LLM), ChatGPT, for intelligent content processing. Unlike conventional document management systems, this solution was designed to actively assist employees by summarizing key insights, automating routine tasks, and providing contextual recommendations to enhance decision-making.
By seamlessly integrating the Virtual Assistant with FARO’s existing infrastructure, Avvale ensured that employees could access information instantly without disrupting established workflows. The system continuously updated itself through its integration with SharePoint, keeping the company’s knowledge base dynamic and always relevant. Just as importantly, role-based access controls provided a secure framework, ensuring that sensitive information was accessible only to authorized personnel.
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 its new AI-powered system in place, FARO experienced a significant shift in operational efficiency. Employees can now quickly locate and access relevant data, reducing the time spent searching through documents and allowing them to focus on high-value tasks. Decision-making became more agile, supported by AI-driven contextual insights and recommendations that provide a clearer, data-backed perspective on operations.
For companies like FARO, the move toward intelligent automation isn’t just an option - it’s a necessity in an increasingly data-driven world. By partnering with Avvale, FARO successfully modernized its document management, reinforcing its commitment to sustainability, operational efficiency and innovation.
