Avvale | Case Study | Grocery Retail HCM Transformation

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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 presence in the territory, had to manage around 13,000 employees only in Italy, an activity that brought many challenges and complex processes, first and foremost the management of support requests from staff. The HR department therefore needed an innovative solution able to streamlining processes and making them more effective, encouraging automation. In particular, the customer needed to redesign the set-up of eight HR areas, to set up a single integrated system and to abandon the individual and different solutions implemented to manage the necessary activities. The primary need was to make a management and cultural change with a new single integrated system.

The Approach

Avvale first performed an in-depth analysis of the current scenario to identify not only the client's unique needs, but also to understand the areas for improvement and adopt the best solution. After the assessment phase, the SAP Success Factor full suite solution was implemented, giving the client a single integrated system capable of handling all the necessary activities. After the reorganization of eight HR areas, four applications which had previously been used, were abandoned in favor of a single solution capable of automating many processes, while also completely dematerializing all the amount of files managed by this area.

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 is able to manage HR processes in a streamlined and innovative way, having a single integrated system that replaces the previous fragmented scenario of individual applications. The management of 13,000 employees is greatly facilitated by the possibility of autonomous updating of personal data and a single point of contact between employees and the HR department, without the need for e-mails or phone calls. The digital and smart approach also reveals a sustainable aspect by dematerializing documents such as recruitment contacts, transfer requests, or pay slips. The solution has therefore thoroughly transformed the client's reality from being a traditional retailer with e-commerce capabilities, to a digital retail company that puts e-commerce, technology, and data at the heart of all its operations and value creation model.

Multinational Grocery Retailer Embraces HCM Digital Transformation

The Challenge

The Approach

The Challenge

The Approach

The Impact