Avvale | Case Study | Global Retail Management Platform

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.

The Challenge

The client, given its widespread global presence, had to manage a massive network of retail stores, having to coordinate not only their logistics and product distribution, but also their consistency in terms of brand image. The distribution of communication and promotion materials, the coordination of omnichannel activities, and the assessment of the store's compliance with corporate image guidelines took place through different tools and complex processes. The client therefore needed a tool that could reduce the complexity of these processes and manage different retail store activities through a single platform, thus improving communication and enabling the rapid deployment of corporate guidelines.

The Approach

Avvale performed an in-depth analysis of the processes and tools adopted by the client to manage retail store activities, in order to fully understand the client's needs and develop a tailor-made solution. Therefore, through a micro front-end approach, a management platform was developed that contained all the applications needed to manage the different activities. The suite of application platform was also implemented by building a UX designed to match the customer's need for a tool capable of managing complex processes in the retail store chain in a fast and intuitive way.

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

Today our client manages its retail store network through a single platform capable of handling all necessary processes and activities. The solution provides a platform that is not only able to distribute centrally defined guidelines, communication materials or useful information for the implementation of marketing campaigns to all stores, but also to verify their correct application within the single retail store. The solution has made it possible to improve and speed up the exchange of information between the corporate and the single retail store, thus has facilitated compliance management. The solution also addresses a number of ancillary needs such as the management of digital signatures or the need of an anti-counterfeiting tool, thus constituting a complete platform helpful to manage communication for the retail store network.

Tailor-Made Suite of Applications Platform to Manage Global Retail Store Network

The Challenge

The Approach

The Challenge

The Approach

The Impact