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Innovating ERP: Certified Financial Information and Integrated Rail Operations
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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, a pioneering force in railway and tramway operations across Southern Italy, has been pivotal in transforming regional mobility since its inception in 1937. With more than 80 years of experience, the company has expanded its reach through modern technologies and strategic expansions, solidifying its role in Puglia's public transport sector.
The Challenge
Amidst its rapid growth, the company embarked on a digital transformation journey to innovate its existing ERP system and optimize its application landscape. The previous legacy system needed certified financial and balance sheet data, leading to inefficiencies in financial reporting.
Furthermore, our client’s application map was marked by data silos, preventing seamless communication between systems. This fragmentation hindered the comprehensive integration of business data, impacting visibility and control over critical processes such as logistics and financial management. To support company growth and streamline operational efficiency, it became essential to consolidate existing systems and implement standardizations to enable integration and interoperability across business functions.
The Approach
Given our proven track record in ERP implementations and deep expertise in SAP technologies, Avvale was selected to support the client in a greenfield SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud implementation - a bold yet strategic move designed to completely revamp the company’s ERP landscape. The project commenced with a comprehensive ERP digital transformation roadmap tailored to the company’s specific needs, meticulously detailing the approach and design methodology to ensure total coverage of shared requirements.
The chosen solution was grounded in SAP's best practices and modern design methodologies, allowing for the leverage of robust and scalable standardized processes. By minimizing the customization of SAP S/4HANA and adhering to fit-to-standard principles, functional gaps were efficiently addressed, with custom programs developed only when essential. This approach reduced implementation complexity while ensuring future scalability and adaptability.
Key to the solution was SAP S/4HANA's in-memory computing technology, which facilitated near-real-time information crucial for agile decision-making and responsive operations. This capability significantly enhanced the client’s ability to meet stringent reporting requirements across Financial Operations (General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Asset Accounting, Basic Treasury) and Logistics (Material Management, Sales, and Distribution).
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 provided the client with a robust and integrated ERP system capable of supporting future growth, aligned with its circular transformation goals. This innovative system has successfully standardized financial processes, ensuring certified financial data and enhancing overall data reliability. Integration between applications has been achieved, resulting in consistent reporting and significant improvements in both financial and logistical processes. Leveraging SAP Best Practices has facilitated the modeling of business processes, optimizing performance and operational efficiency.
The company now benefits from real-time insights crucial for agile decision-making, reinforcing its position as a leader in regional mobility solutions.
