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SEAT Accelerates Internal Ideas Program Through Automation

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.

SEAT is a company that designs, develops, manufactures, and markets cars in Spain. Integrated into the Volkswagen Group, they sell vehicles under the CUPRA and SEAT brands, while SEAT MÓ is the business unit that covers urban mobility products and solutions. SEAT exports more than 80% of its vehicles and is present in 75 countries. The company employs around 15,000 professionals and has three production sites in Catalunya.

The Challenge

Employee feedback and ideas are valuable assets, especially to SEAT. Previously, company feedback submissions could only be accessed through the internal network, creating roadblocks for employees working on the assembly line who required a more agile solution. In addition, submission reviewers worked through a manual, lengthy process and often faced accumulations of proposals. SEAT approached Avvale with the idea to automate, mobilizing the evaluation and execution process.

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The Approach

Together with Avvale, SEAT implemented a solution created on SAP Cloud Platform to internally promote management improvement in an automated way. Now when a suggestion is submitted, an in-app evaluation process is triggered to begin reviewing any suggestions. This app is accessible from any deceive and all employees can now submit their feedback.

After suggestions are sent via an app, they are evaluated by a strict criteria set up by SEAT and then the potential ROI is analyzed. The team who manages the improvements are then able to review which ideas are beneficial to the company and generate reports for further evaluation. 

For management, this solution enables increased accuracy, providing immediate return on investment and streamlining processes both by region and globally. 

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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

With this solution, SEAT automated their idea selection process and increased response rate by opening up the opportunity to provide feedback to frontline workers. Because of the app, the process of evaluating ideas is faster, as robust suggestions can be executed sooner rather than later. 

The number of idea submissions in the first half increased to more than 3,000 submissions, 81% of which were valid to be further reviewed with 3% of reaching the implementation phase.

In addition to the app, human resources experienced improvements on integration with the payroll system for employee rewards and integration with SuccessFactors.

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