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Enhancing SAP System Performance and Cost-Efficient Database Storage for a Large Holdings Company
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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 prominent Colombian conglomerate, spanning sectors like media, entertainment, retail, energy, research, and transportation. Their aim is to drive sustainable growth and transform their service-oriented businesses with innovative models. Leveraging their expertise and strong partnerships, they serve as the strategic architect for this consortium, promoting the exchange of management practices and information across projects.
The Challenge
The project encountered a significant challenge due to the size of the holding company, which oversees more than 25 companies. Their ERP system, SAP ECC 6.0, EHP 8, along with a database of approximately 12 TB, was experiencing constant growth. To tackle this issue, it was imperative to implement preventive and proactive measures necessary for efficiently managing the data lifecycle stored in their database.
This includes safeguarding older data that is no longer essential for daily operations but may be required for legal or audit purposes. The transfer of this data out of the database to an alternative storage solution became a critical step. This transfer would substantially reduce their data storage requirements, leading to improved response and administration times, ultimately resulting in reduced storage costs.
The Approach
To address these challenges, Avvale introduced a comprehensive archiving plan for the holding company's production system. This involved an initial system analysis to understand data growth factors and define a targeted archiving strategy to address critical contributors to database expansion. This strategy was executed, involving data migration and archival storage setup. Avvale integrated this archiving approach into the daily operations, ensuring continual data growth management, cost control, compliance adherence, and seamless data access.
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
Through the implementation of our 12 TB archiving strategy, involving database table monitoring, reorganization, and storage optimization, the client experienced several benefits. Indeed, this strategy substantially improved system performance by reducing database size, and resulted in cost savings by transferring infrequently accessed data from the primary database storage to more economical storage solutions. Furthermore, the time required for database backups and associated bandwidth costs for data transfers were notably reduced. Ultimately, our archiving strategy played a pivotal role in lowering disaster recovery expenses. By streamlining and efficiently managing the database, the client became better equipped to handle potential data disasters, mitigating the financial and operational impact of such events.
