Avvale | Case Study | A New Centralized Control Model

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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

As the company expanded, its dependence on SAP for core business processes grew, making the move to AWS a strategic decision to fully harness the advantages of cloud technology. However, once the migration was complete, our client encountered significant challenges in managing its cloud environment. With critical applications running on AWS, the company needed a reliable CloudOps service to provide around-the-clock operational oversight, safeguard business continuity, and control costs, all while easing the load on their internal IT teams.

The company needed to guarantee uninterrupted service for its mission-critical applications, which required comprehensive on-call support for high-severity incidents. Additionally, they had to implement a proactive monitoring system that could catch and resolve potential issues. As the company scaled, cloud security became crucial, necessitating strict governance and access control measures. And all of this had to be achieved while optimizing operational costs, without sacrificing performance.
Recognizing the need for a more strategic approach, the company turned to Avvale for ongoing management of its cloud infrastructure.

The Approach

Avvale caught this opportunity to harness the full potential of AWS, transforming the infrastructure into a key driver of business growth and efficiency. Drawing on our expertise in managing enterprise-level cloud environments and deep knowledge of AWS CloudOps technologies, we set out to optimize our client cloud management.

The first step was to design a cloud governance model that provided centralized control and transparency across the company's cloud environment. AWS Organizations were implemented to simplify the management of multiple accounts, while AWS Systems Manager and CloudWatch were deployed to ensure real-time operational insights and proactive monitoring.

With security as a priority, Avvale integrated AWS IAM for granular user permissions and AWS CloudTrail for tracking activity and ensuring compliance. At the same time, Avvale incorporated a FinOps approach to cloud cost management, optimizing resource allocation and preventing overspending through smart tagging policies and AWS Budget alerts. This allowed our client to achieve cost efficiency without compromising the performance of their cloud systems. Regular infrastructure maintenance, patching, and disaster recovery checks further strengthened the resilience of their operations.

The result was a tailored CloudOps service that gave continuous operational support, enhanced security, and a scalable foundation for future growth - all without disrupting their daily business.

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

By following AWS best practices, Avvale supported the company through the design of their landing zone and establishing effective cloud governance via the CloudOps service.

This approach significantly reduced the manual effort required to manage their cloud infrastructure, while also enhancing security and compliance protocols to ensure strong protection as the company continued to grow. The infrastructure’s resilience improved with the introduction of geographic Disaster Recovery solutions, providing enhanced business continuity. Avvale also optimized resource allocation, cutting waste and energy consumption, which helped our client manage IT costs more efficiently without sacrificing performance.

This strategic approach enabled more efficient operations while also contributing to a more responsible and sustainable use of cloud resources.

Strengthening AWS Cloud Governance Leveraging a New Centralized Control Model

The Challenge

The Approach

The Challenge

The Approach

The Impact