Balancing Centralization and Localization:
Polynt’s Unified HCM System for a Global Workforce
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
For over 70 years, Polynt has been a prominent player in the chemical intermediates sector, specializing in the production, sales, research, and development of organic anhydrides and their derivatives. With a global footprint spanning Europe, America, and Asia, Polynt’s strategic expansion and consolidation efforts have solidified its central role in the industry.
The company's ongoing commitment to innovation and excellence has been significantly supported by a two-decade partnership with Avvale, which has overseen every facet of Polynt’s SAP landscape.
The Challenge
Polynt faced substantial obstacles in modernizing its HR management system to align with its expansive global operations. The primary challenge was balancing centralization with localization to accommodate the diverse needs of its workforce of over 3,000 employees across multiple countries. The company needed to harmonize its HR processes to ensure consistency while also addressing local regulations and requirements. This entailed integrating and replacing fragmented HR systems to establish a unified, cohesive infrastructure.
Key areas of focus included implementing a standardized recruitment tool to manage hiring processes across varied regions effectively and consolidating disparate compensation policies into a single, coherent system that could adapt to regional differences. Additionally, Polynt aimed to enhance its analytics and reporting capabilities to support data-driven decision-making.
These challenges highlighted the necessity for a comprehensive, integrated HR solution to streamline operations and boost effectiveness across Polynt’s international network.
The Approach
To address Polynt's HR management challenges, Avvale conducted a thorough assessment of the existing HR landscape, identifying key areas for improvement. A priority was placed on engaging stakeholders, ensuring that the key decision-makers were aligned and supportive of the transformation.
The initiative began with the creation of a comprehensive roadmap for deploying SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite, with a focus on building a global core HR platform. Central to this strategy was leveraging SAP Best Practices and pre-built integrations to expedite the implementation process. A comprehensive training plan was developed, incorporating continuous learning opportunities to keep all stakeholders updated on new features and best practices. Avvale established specific, measurable goals for the deployment and utilized SuccessFactors’ analytics tools to monitor progress and ensure project objectives were met. Particular attention was given to data migration and integration, focusing on maintaining data quality and ensuring seamless connectivity with existing systems. A phased rollout approach was adopted to manage complexity and minimize disruption.
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
Guided by Avvale, Polynt has achieved a more sustainable HR landscape by streamlining operations, reducing administrative burdens, and implementing consistent HR processes across the company's extensive international network. The company has significantly accelerated the hiring process, improving talent acquisition efficiency and enabling a better response to regional market demands. Standardizing compensation policies has simplified payroll management and enhanced transparency across different regions. The integration of advanced analytics and dashboards through SAP Analytics Cloud has empowered Polynt with real-time insights, driving more informed strategic decisions and boosting overall HR effectiveness. As a result, Polynt now operates with a more agile, data-driven HR function that supports its global growth and adapts seamlessly to evolving business needs.
As Polynt continues to grow, the long-standing partnership with Avvale remains pivotal. Avvale’s ongoing management of the AMS SuccessFactors service ensures that Polynt’s HR systems remain aligned with best practices and evolving industry standards, reinforcing the company's commitment to a more sustainable global integration.
