Madrileña Red De Gas Reduces Response Time from Hours to Minutes with RPA
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Madrileña Red de Gas is the first company in the Iberian Peninsula to operate a distribution network completely independent of the rest of the businesses in the gas value chain. It is also the third largest gas distribution company in Spain by number of supply points-- more than 898,000. It currently distributes gas in 59 municipalities of the Autonomous Community, including the capital city, Madrid.
The Challenge
Madrileña Red de Gas faced the challenge of efficiently managing their manual response process to complaints from various official entities. The solution needed to address the challenges of high volume, comprehension of documents, and integration, while also correctly extracting specific fields from PDF claims. After analyzing various market solutions, they opted for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) implemented by Avvale, as the most suitable solution for their needs.
The Approach
RPA utilizes specialized computer programs, known as software robots to automate and standardize repeatable business processes. Working as virtual assistants, bots replicate the same steps a person would perform automatically. This reduces the number of tedious tasks, which optimizes time for employees to focus on other projects that are strategic or revenue-generating for the organization. To support the automation aspect of the RPA, UiPath was implemented. With this automation feature, user errors were eliminated, time spent on menial tasks were reduced, and workflows were standardized.
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
Madrileña Red de Gas successfully implemented an RPA solution with the help of Avvale, which provided a modern and tailored solution to their needs in just a month and a half. The UiPath solution offers cloud-based monitoring and execution through Orchestrator, and its ability to interact and integrate with most systems allows for efficient data collection and entry. The customer service department saw immediate benefits, as their processes were optimized, and the entire customer complaint cycle can now be tracked, improving the customer experience while maximizing productivity.
The implementation also brought additional advantages, including significant time and cost savings. The deployment of a robot to analyze complaints and collect data for crafting response letters, a process that previously took three to four hours, now takes only five minutes. The ability to manage the influx and response rate of complaints from official bodies also results in cost savings. Furthermore, the automated process significantly reduces the potential for human error, as data collection and response letters now follow a defined logic. Overall, the RPA solution has provided Madrileña Red de Gas with new functionalities that improve their customer service and increase their response capacity.
The implementation also brought additional advantages, including significant time and cost savings. The deployment of a robot to analyze complaints and collect data for crafting response letters, a process that previously took three to four hours, now takes only five minutes. The ability to manage the influx and response rate of complaints from official bodies also results in cost savings. Furthermore, the automated process significantly reduces the potential for human error, as data collection and response letters now follow a defined logic. Overall, the RPA solution has provided Madrileña Red de Gas with new functionalities that improve their customer service and increase their response capacity.
