Real-time Billing Boosts Supplier Relations at a Major Colombian Airline
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
If you want to elevate your travel experience to new heights, our client is just what you need.
One of Colombia's top airlines - with 16,000+ employees and 200+ aircraft, flies you to 100+ destinations in 26 countries across the Americas and Europe - recently joined forces with Avvale to streamline billing and improve supplier relations, offering real-time billing updates.
The Challenge
Two years ago, our client decided to enhance its invoice management system by implementing SAP Vendor Invoice Management by OpenText. While collaborating with Avvale to adopt this solution, the company identified a crucial opportunity to streamline their invoicing procedures, aiming to automate manual tasks and improve internal efficiency by integrating their various existing systems.
Improving supplier relationships to facilitate real-time billing status would lead to substantial improvements in internal efficiency within the accounts payable process. Integrating the FUEL and FLIGHT ORDER booths with SAP Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) was the key solution. It would streamline the entire billing process, reduce the risk of manual errors, and provide control over the process by allowing constant monitoring of invoice statuses in the SAP VIM solution.
The Approach
Avvale's integration expertise allowed the development of three critical processes to automate tasks:
- ARIBA Network and SAP VIM Integration, which encompassed two essential phases:
- Inbound: SAP VIM was integrated to receive ARIBA Network invoices, creating a new reception channel.
- Outbound: Automatic invoice status updates were sent to the ARIBA Network for easy access and reference.
- Integration with FUEL to automate the transmission of legal invoice data and initiate the corresponding process within the FUEL cockpit.
- Integration with FLIGHT ORDER to automatically transmit legal invoice data and start the process within the FLIGHT ORDER cockpit.
Given the complexity of the process, we applied a tailored logic to determine the status of VIM invoices sent exclusively via ARIBA. Additionally, since invoices arrive from various channels and utilize an IDOC for IATA, we customized OpenText's standard logic to align invoice statuses between VIM and ARIBA, tailored to their business needs. Also, the legal number of the invoice was adjusted, and stored in a non-standard field. This development was exclusively designed and implemented to meet the company's unique requirements.
This unlocked the transfer of data between systems, promoting risk reduction, better control, monitoring, and internal management.
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
Thanks to Avvale's support in system integration, the company significantly improved its time efficiency and internal management activities. Additionally, the client enhanced its strategy for disseminating functionalities to its suppliers, enabling them to access real-time updates on their invoicing processes through the integrated VIM-ARIBA system. The manual data transfer process from VIM to FUEL, a specialized fuel invoice processing system, was completely eliminated. This eliminated the risk of entering erroneous data, streamlined processing times, and ensured that both systems remained synchronized in terms of invoice status. Consequently, VIM reports now accurately reflect and consolidate invoicing status in FUEL.
Similarly, the manual data transfer process from VIM to FLIGHT ORDER, a system handling invoicing generated by flight orders, has been eradicated. This reduction in manual data handling not only mitigates associated risks but also optimizes processing times and consolidates invoicing status reports generated by VIM.
Furthermore, the implementation of new functionalities has optimized internal control and management of invoicing processes, thereby preventing potential duplications that could arise from multiple reception channels.
