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Financial Evolution: Unifying Operations Through a Centralized Self-Management Portal
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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 one of Colombia’s largest and most strategic companies, operating across the entire hydrocarbon value chain, from exploration and production to refining, transportation, and commercialization. With a strong presence in Colombia and expanding operations into Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, the company plays a critical role in the energy sector. Its extensive network of over 18 subsidiaries drives growth and innovation across multiple regions.
The Challenge
Giving continuity to the innovation and digital transformation strategy, the company’s Financial Operations Department needed to integrate, optimize and automate the systems and bots that are currently configured on multiple platforms. The goal was to consolidate them into a single self-management portal. This centralized portal will improve the financial area processes, including portfolio management, collection, payments, accounts payable, invoicing, tax and accounting management in more than 18 subsidiaries nationwide.
The Department was seeking a secure, centralized access point that optimizes the use of resources, integrating with existing financial information systems, and enabling real-time self-management of requests with automated tracking and timely resolution. The additional objective was to improve the user experience in searching, querying, sorting, and escalating information.
The Approach
Avvale led the implementation of the company's Financial Self-Management Portal, ensuring alignment with the objectives of senior management. From the outset, the focus was on deeply understanding the company's processes, KPIs, and specific needs to deliver a customized, robust, and secure solution. Divided into three phases and guided by agile methodologies such as Design Thinking, the project evolved from conception to the refinement of the user experience. Avvale crafted a solution that fused advanced SAP and OpenText integrations within a user-friendly portal, covering areas such as communication, purchasing, finance and sales, ensuring more agility, autonomy and efficiency for customer operations.
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 implementation of the Financial Self-Management Portal transformed the company's financial operations by centralizing queries and procedures on a secure, integrated platform. It has automated 100% of manual tasks, significantly reducing calls and emails between areas and generating estimated savings of up to 1,250 man-hours per month. The portal improves customer and supplier service, streamlines processes such as payments, invoicing and tax management, and enables progress towards a single tax system for the company and its subsidiaries. Along with strengthening relationships with stakeholders, the portal increases operational and financial sustainability, promoting practices in line with corporate responsibility and adapting efficiently to regulatory changes.
