Supermajor Oil Company Seamlessly Connects Thousands of Suppliers and Users with Web Portal Solution
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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 is an Italian multinational energy company headquartered in Rome. Considered one of the seven supermajor oil companies in the world, they employ over 32,000 people in nearly 62 countries. The company's priority is integrating sustainability into its business model, ensuring a socially just energy transition, and guaranteeing access to energy for everyone while actively safeguarding the environment.
The Challenge
With over 26,000 suppliers and 36,335 active users, our client recognized the need for a unified access point to streamline supplier interactions. Their previous system lacked a centralized platform, resulting in fragmented processes and a reliance on offline operations. The goal was to replace it with a fully comprehensive and integrated hub to enhance efficiency, improve user experience, and centralize operations.
Since Avvale had a long-standing relationship with the client in the system integration field, by choosing us, they benefited from a competitive, trusted partner who could navigate the complexities of their systems and deliver successful outcomes driven by our knowledge of internal processes.
Since Avvale had a long-standing relationship with the client in the system integration field, by choosing us, they benefited from a competitive, trusted partner who could navigate the complexities of their systems and deliver successful outcomes driven by our knowledge of internal processes.
The Approach
In collaboration with the client, we decided to develop an interactive platform as the only point of access to collaborate with the company. The solution is a web portal that serves as a front-end development platform, using a web CMS (content management system) to create and manage the visual interface and user experience. A key aspect is the presence of a high-level programming language in the backend, independent from the installed infrastructure, allowing the portal to be customized and tailored according to the company's specific needs without restrictions by the underlying infrastructure. To ensure the effective operation of the solution, we implemented the supporting infrastructure and operational logic using an Application Server, managing the underlying processes and basic functionality required for the portal, granting a seamless and reliable user experience.
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 implementing a secure and streamlined platform, the collaboration between our client and its suppliers has significantly improved, enhancing engagement and efficiency.
A simplified registration process grants suppliers access to a secure private area to seamlessly exchange data and documents throughout the collaboration and easily manage banking details for invoice payments, ensuring smooth financial transactions.
The portal allows for independent management of users' roles and customization of skills, fostering greater autonomy and flexibility in their collaboration. Suppliers can now easily apply for specific company and merchandise groups, aligning their offerings more precisely with client requirements. They can also track the status of their qualifications and monitor contract statuses, facilitating better resource planning and decision-making.
The portal streamlines the invoicing process, automatically receiving invoices and providing real-time updates on the processing status.
Thanks to a user-friendly interface, suppliers can conveniently upload required documentation and submit necessary anti-mafia documentation, ensuring compliance and smooth information exchange.
Centralizing functions in a single point fosters a more sustainable and circular approach. It reduces time consumption, as suppliers can easily access the necessary tools and information in one location, and decreases e-mail communication, minimizing web traffic. The portal's content certification feature ensures the accuracy and reliability of information shared, supporting a more sustainable supply chain.
