Italian Insurance Leader Reduces 60% Processing Time Leveraging AMS
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
If you have ever taken the plunge and signed up for life insurance, chances are you've crossed paths with our client - an undisputed leader in Italy when it comes to Bancassurance and supplementary pensions. As an arm of one of the largest banking groups in Italy, they specialize in innovative insurance, investment, and pension savings solutions, creating value for customers with a constant focus on service levels.
The Challenge
At Avvale, we understand the challenges of managing multiple CFO/Risk custom applications while operating within tight budget constraints. When our client, after years of working with the same provider, decided to explore other options, we were ready to step in. Our team's extensive expertise in the processes and applications involved allowed us to offer a qualified competitive offer that addressed their specific needs. The operation was critical since any malfunction or delayed controls could significantly impact the insurance company's monthly financial closing. Thanks to our efficient data processing capabilities, we ensured a smooth and timely financial closure.
The Approach
Driven by our unwavering commitment and extensive understanding of their specific processes and application, Avvale secured the renewal of the app maintenance contract, specifically focusing on the Application Management Service for a suite of CFO/Risk custom applications built on the Microsoft SQL Server platform. Working collaboratively with the client, we actively engaged in discussions and consultations to create a shared vision and establish clear goals. With the goals set, Avvale assembled a dedicated team of experienced professionals to take charge of the ongoing maintenance and support of the applications.
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
Avvale’s AMS helped the client meet Solvency and IVASS regulations, streamline operations, and comply with industry standards. The user-friendly software enabled efficient management and analysis of processing stages, improving overall efficiency. Additionally, the client benefited from improved monitoring of dormant policies, enhanced tracking tools, and simplified communication procedures contributing to sustainability efforts and better data-driven decisions.
Our solutions exhibited exceptional performance with a low anomaly rate during production releases, instilling confidence in the reliability of the implemented systems. The result was a remarkable 60% reduction in processing time, enabling prompt discrepancy resolution and improving operational efficiency.
