R&M Rolls Out SAP ERP, Overcomes Obstacles of Local Regulations to Add Value and Optimization
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Based in Switzerland, Reichle & De-Massari (R&M) is one of the world's leading manufacturers and suppliers in innovative cabling systems for data and communication networks. In Brazil, R&M is headquartered in the technological pole located in Minas Gerais and provides infrastructure solutions such as wireline, cellular, 5G and rail networks, fiber, and more.
The Challenge
From the beginning, the team understood that the success of this project was not only dependent on complying with Brazilian regulations, but also complying with the operating model required by the R&M group. By listing the business structure requirements, understanding the needed inputs and outputs, and focusing on R&M's strategic objectives, Avvale developed a plan to meet R&M’s needs. This implementation was integrated with R&M's broader processes, which allowed the group to standardize its business processes, while respecting local country requirements.
Due to this solution, R&M simplified their processes and some tasks were even automated. Some of these processes included administrative, accounting, and cost closing. Another benefit is the increased accuracy and reduced time to meet R&M's requirements. Moreover, data can be shared in real time within the same platform with the head office in Switzerland. As a result, the group reporting system has the most recent data and reports are generated according to the approved standards. Avvale implemented the SAP modules Sales (SD), Purchasing and Inventory Management (MM), Production (PP), Finance and Accounting (FI), and Controlling and Cost Management (CO) with integrations to external systems (Fiscal). The development of every project phase was done in conjunction with R&M to ensure compliance and minimum impact on the day-to-day business. Avvale also scheduled training sessions for users to understand how to use the new system.
The Approach
Avvale collaborated with the local teams to develop compliance to global processes in a consistent manner. The implementation of SAP and integration with R&M's broader processes allowed the group to standardize its business processes, while respecting local country requirements.
Avvale implemented the SAP modules Sales (SD), Purchasing and Inventory Management (MM), Production (PP), Finance and Accounting (FI), and Controlling and Cost Management (CO) with integrations to external systems (Fiscal). The development of every project phase was accomplished with R&M to ensure compliance and minimum impact on the day-to-day business. The change management process required users to be trained using the new processes and transactions in the system.
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
R&M has implemented integrated end-to-end processes, benefiting the company with global production alignment, increased inventory control accuracy and ease of information tracking, global compliance and best practices, increased planning capacity, real-time access to business information, online integration of accounts payable and receivable with banks, automated bank conciliation, real-time fiscal obligation availability, cohesive production planning among global offices, improved sales process from pre-sales to client product delivery, automation of credit analysis process, and eased tax process management through automation. Despite facing challenges such as the pandemic and difficulty in understanding Brazilian legislation, R&M and Avvale completed the 100% online implementation in five months.
