Major Railway Company Fast-Tracks Cloud Migration with Award-Winning Strategy
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC) provides key transportation for locals and tourists in and around Spain. Owned by the Generalitat de Catalunya, the company operates thousands of railways, from narrow to broad, across the region in addition to several resorts and funiculars. From the mountains to the metro lines of Barcelona, FGC is a vital part of Spanish infrastructure.
The Challenge
FGC sought to quickly improve all businesses processes by upgrading their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). The biggest challenge of this project was meeting the ambitious deadline: six months to migrate without causing disruption to users and business. Together with Avvale, FGC completed the migration within the timeframe. The delivery was so successful that it won 1st prize in the SAP FAST DELIVERY award.
The Approach
It was ultimately decided that FGC would upgrade and convert their SAP workloads from ERP Ehp5 to S/4HANA. During this transition, it was important to factor in the 200 users to keep disruption at a minimum. With a detailed plan and consistent communication, this enabled a successful migration. To further propel success, Avvale led training sessions from the beginning to ensure FGC understood how to effectively use the new platform. Using the latest migration methodology and a test phase, the team met the strict deadline while mitigating risk and strategizing effective change management. Because of the attention to detail during the preparation stages, migration was performed in one step, saving time and resources.
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 implementation of S/4HANA, FGC transformed its processes, achieving a more effective model of resource planning while generating a positive impact on the company’s organization and resources. By updating their SAP ECC system to S/4HANA, FGC is empowered to further their digital transformation and improve the performance of its services. Today, Avvale continues to work on the process of innovation and transformation together with FGC in other projects.
