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Crafting a Unified IT Landscape: Neodecortech Group’s Path to Integration
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Neodecortech Group, comprising Neodecortech S.p.A., Cartiere di Guarcino S.p.A., and Bio Energia Guarcino S.r.l., is a leading force in Italy's decorative paper industry and a recognized European leader. The Group exemplifies a circular economy with a fully integrated industrial supply chain, producing energy, raw materials, and innovative products that meet the sophisticated demands of contemporary interior design.
The Challenge
Neodecortech Group faced significant operational challenges due to its reliance on two different ERP systems, each with an average lifespan of 15-20 years. This legacy infrastructure required frequent updates just to remain functional, and with the discontinuation of support from certain software vendors, the Group's IT environment became increasingly vulnerable. These challenges were compounded by the complexity of their information system, which relied on numerous integration interfaces – many nearing the end of their lifecycle – adding further strain on their IT infrastructure. Moreover, the lack of updated application documentation posed a significant risk to the Group's operational continuity.
It became evident that a comprehensive Digital Evolution project was urgently needed to consolidate and modernize the Group’s IT landscape.
The Approach
Considering the complexity of the strategic challenges it faces, including those related to digital transformation, Neodecortech decided to proceed with the unification and modernization of the different ERPs present in the companies. To best accomplish this, Neodecortech selected Avvale as its partner.
Avvale approach was both structured and collaborative, involving the integration of existing systems and the development of custom solutions where necessary, providing a comprehensive framework that could adapt to the Neodecortech Group's specific needs. By harmonizing key business processes across all major functions – accounting, management control, logistics, sales, and production – we created a unified model that laid the groundwork for future growth and adaptability.
The decision to implement SAP S/4HANA on a private cloud was central to the project, aimed at unifying the Neodecortech Group's operations under a single, efficient, and customized ERP system. By integrating best practices and maintaining a focus on the Group's long-term vision, we delivered a strategic and seamless transformation.
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
As a result of a customized and collaborative digital journey, Neodecortech Group realized its vision of a unified and more sustainable ERP system across its subsidiaries. This transformation leads to increased productivity through streamlined intra-company processes and to the elimination of redundant systems, contributing to a more circular and resource-efficient business model.
The Group benefits from a more efficient management structure, where integrated and globally shared near-real-time data supports decision-making processes across the entire organization, potentially reducing operational costs. Additionally, the consolidation of IT systems aligns with Neodecortech Group’s commitment to environmental sustainability by minimizing electronic waste and lowering the energy footprint thanks to an innovative cloud-based solution.
Overall, this project strengthens the organizational identity by uniting the diverse companies within the Group under a single, robust system.
