Avvale | Case Study | Lavazza Group reshapes Financial Reporting and Accounting

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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

Operating globally with over 40 subsidiaries, Lavazza faced significant challenges in managing distributed financial processes across diverse systems and operational models. The need to consolidate the financials of new acquisitions, such as MaxiCoffee, alongside increasing workload during peak periods underscored the importance of a harmonized, automated approach. The company required a solution to accelerate integration, reduce monthly and annual closing cycles, simplify internal processes, and ensure high compliance standards. As Lavazza expanded into new markets, scalability and flexibility became critical to manage workloads effectively and enhance accuracy and timeliness in financial operations.

The Approach

Lavazza turned to Avvale’s expertise to redesign its Financial Reporting & Accounting architecture with an integrated, sustainable vision. Avvale led a targeted “Automation Journey” leveraging the UiPath Business Automation Platform, starting with a strategic discovery phase to identify critical areas for efficiency and scalability. Over 30 finance processes were analyzed, prioritizing those with high automation potential. Through the adoption of Intelligent Automation solutions, Avvale implemented a modular and flexible approach that enabled the automation of more than 20 key processes and introduced unattended bots, attended and custom dashboards for autonomous management of accounting flows by teams.

This strategic roadmap gradually involved new departments and international branches, implementing new technologies step by step while seamlessly integrating them with the existing SAP systems. Thanks to this integration, Lavazza has transformed its accounting management into a harmonized, highly governable, and centralized process. By introducing dedicated automations - such as the consolidation of MaxiCoffee, cash receipt clearing, and IFRS 16 management - Lavazza has further centralized and streamlined workflows, reducing operational times and enhancing control over company data. The result is an agile and scalable accounting structure capable of evolving alongside the company’s growth.

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

The integration of Intelligent Automation into Lavazza's financial processes has delivered significant results in terms of efficiency and governance, achieving payback within just a few months. Monthly and annual closing times have been reduced, and accounting processes are now fully centralized and scalable. Through automation, Lavazza has successfully optimized and harmonized existing business processes while developing new ones, ensuring operational continuity and consistency. More broadly, the introduction of Intelligent Automation tools has allowed Lavazza employees to enhance performance and improve work-life balance. The energy saved is redirected toward more strategic activities, as well as personal training and development.

Thanks to these innovations, data governance and security have been strengthened, ensuring high compliance and enabling agile responses to the challenges of multinational management. Integration with SAP and the use of robots have simplified the management of complex processes, promoting scalability and the replicability of automations across all Group companies, while ensuring greater flexibility in adapting to regulatory changes. Overall, with the support of Avvale, Lavazza has improved employees' quality of work life by reducing stress during workload peaks and facilitating large-scale operations management, all in line with the company’s values of sustainability and innovation.

Lavazza Group reshapes Financial Reporting and Accounting across 19 Subsidiaries using Intelligent Automation

The Challenge

The Approach

The Challenge

The Approach

The Impact