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Pharmaceutical Manufacturer Creates Value Faster by Upgrading to the Cloud
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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 a global pharmaceutical company with operations in Europe, South America, and Asia. They chose to work with Avvale migrate their systems from on-premises to the cloud.
The Challenge
With their previous support set to expire in 2027 and major innovations already taking place in the business landscape, our client began searching for a solution that would integrate their digital transformation strategy into their core business while minimizing impact on their day-to-day operations. Simultaneously, the company wanted to future-proof its core business processes to avoid any potential risk in 2027.
The Approach
The system migration took eight months and provided a solution for 1,000 business users in 13 subsidiaries across Europe and Brazil, representing almost half of the company's workforce. The project methodology was based on Avvale's industrialized approach to SAP S/4HANA conversion, consisting of three steps: Discovery, Requirements, and Migration. The functional improvements included enhancing financial and controlling processes, implementing product lifecycle management (PLM), and incorporating 15 SAP Fiori applications with search and embedded analytics. The project also implemented SAP Solution Manager Test Management, ITSM, and ChaRM to ensure complete IT governance and operational control for increased visibility and system control.
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 customer saw benefits immediately, including optimized procurement processes facilitated by mobile SAP Fiori applications, a faster month-end close relying on a single finance platform, and significant improvements in system runtimes. Furthermore, administrative tasks and hours have been reduced, allowing the company to redirect staff resources towards more strategic activities.
