Reduce Closing Time Through Consolidated Financial Ecosystem
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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 globally recognized Italian manufacturer of coffee products who operates in a number of retail coffee shops with a wide range of offerings in its product portfolio. With more than 120 years of history, this family-run company transformed into a global enterprise with more than two billion in revenue and almost four thousand employees.
The Challenge
The company experienced rapid growth in recent years due to a global strategy of acquisitions. Naturally, they needed to evolve its controlling model accordingly to new opportunities offered by the market. Our client wanted to increase efficiency with their internal reporting tool as there were delays with accessing accurate planned data to share with financial controllers. Even more so, their finance department managed their entire budgeting process in Excel and would then upload the collected data into SAP ECC for full calculation. Lastly, they wanted to integrate their financial consolidation process with their planning process to reduce resources spent on the controlling process.
To leverage their ideal financial landscape, our client needed a solution that enables a smarter and leaner budget creation process, by reducing time on the closure and by gaining a detailed margin analysis.
The Approach
Avvale performed a custom process analysis of the customer’s financial ecosystem. Using these findings, they created an efficient business workflow by consolidating their platform with SAP BPC 10.1. This solution provides a strong and flexible Planning & Control model to optimize business processes.
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 a structured Planning & Control model resulted in various benefits for the organization. Firstly, it has significantly reduced the time spent on end-of-month closing times and planning, as there is now a strong integration between finance and other departmental planning models. This integration has also resulted in reliable compliance with the IFRS Model, ensuring that data is consistent and can be traced between external and internal reporting.
Additionally, relevant KPIs by area of responsibility are now available, along with margin calculations both at the global and local level. The implementation of the Planning & Control model has also facilitated integration between controlling and transactional processes, leading to more guided data entry, validation rules, and tasks control for users.
Finally, the availability of easily accessible data and enhanced automation has reduced time required to address planning, budgeting, and consolidation activities.
