Grupo Lar Builds a Digital Foundation for Further International Growth
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Grupo Lar is a prestigious family-owned Spanish real estate company, with more than 40 years of international experience. They are dedicated to the promotion, investment, and management of real estate assets. Their staff consists of more than 300 people across 7 countries: Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Romania, and Poland.
The Challenge
Grupo Lar has a long history of using SAP workloads; however, they approached Avvale to take their system to the next level as they looked towards international expansion. SAP HANA was selected to be incorporated into their financial systems in order to facilitate the consolidation of all countries’ and subsidiaries activity. Above all, the reliability, accessibility, and simplicity of HANA motivated Grupo Lar to undergo this project.
Additionally, standardizing platforms in each market through migration would allow an agile and systematic flow of information to and from headquarters for clear communication.
The Approach
Avvale started by performing an in-depth analysis of the pre-existing ERP system and business processes. Equipped with a deep understanding of the business, Avvale created a plan for Grupo Lar to adapt their financial business processes to the best SAP practices, which would allow them to improve their control model while reducing the need for platform customization. The best practices also allow Grupo Lar to reduce the total cost of implementation and simultaneously improve the governance, control, and efficiency of its financial operations.
In addition to the migration, Grupo Lar required upgrades to digital mobility and explored the SAP Fiori platform. This mobilizes processes in a simple way and unifies the user experience without adding complexity to the technical infrastructure.
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 SAP HANA, Grupo Lar can digitally transform their infrastructure and modernize their management model. They are also equipped to improve their ability to adapt to changing circumstances since migrating from an on-premise model to the cloud. This also allows them to spend less time working on the infrastructure layer and the technical operation to focus solely on what the business needs.
The new business processes launched with the implementation of HANA, empowering the company to have total control over their data. Together, Avvale and Grupo Lar completed this transformation in just three months by using accelerators that reduced any potential roadblocks.
The first phase was completed with minimal impact, without interruptions to financial processes, and kept a safe record of the entire database. Some of the immediate benefits experienced was the improvement in performance, robustness of the application, and agile infrastructure. With a strong digital core, the customer service process was optimized as employees were able to enhance their communication platform for customers.
Always wanting to improve their processes, Grupo Lar set three future objectives to meet: implement these same solutions to the Colombia and Peru offices, simplify their information systems, and improve and optimize the commercial management that allows them to monitor the sale from the signing of the contract to the delivery of the homes. Avvale plans to support Grupo Lar every step of the way in the journey towards digital transformation.
