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Solvay Harmonizes IT Change Management with ChaRM
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Founded in 1863, Solvay S.A. is a global chemical company operating in 53 countries, with more than 30,000 employees, 145 sites, and 21 major R&D centers. The company serves diversified markets worldwide, from consumer goods to energy.
The Challenge
Following the acquisition of Rhodia, Solvay’s IT organization became responsible for the governance of a larger landscape, consisting of approximately 60 SAP and 150 non-SAP environments. In addition, Rhodia’s IT governance and change management processes were completely different from the ones in use at Solvay, creating an additional layer of complexity and risk. It was critical for Solvay to identify a single, common solution that would help them minimize the risk of IT services disruptions which, especially for mission critical systems, would have a direct impact on the continuity of Solvay’s business operations. Therefore, Solvay needed a platform that would allow them to simplify, centralize, and consolidate the governance process, while at the same time be robust and scalable enough to support an organization of that size. Solvay also required the ability to release a single change, developed centrally and approved once, to multiple production systems at the same time.
The Approach
After evaluating the different options available on the market, Solvay identified SAP Solution Manager as the optimal platform. Not only would SAP Solution Manager be able to address the short terms need of a mature, centralized Change and Release Management process with ChaRM, but it could also support Solvay’s journey towards the adoption of Information Technology Infrastructure Library practices. The initial weeks of the project were spent performing a FIT/GAP analysis between Solution Manager’s ChaRM process. Once the design of the common to-be process was finalized, the deployment of ChaRM took approximately 18 weeks to go-live on the main business critical landscapes. ChaRM was then gradually rolled-out to the rest of the landscapes in the 3 months following the first go-live.
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
Leveraging SAP Solution Manager’s ChaRM, Solvay was able to create a single central IT Change Management process that allowed them to monitor every single change throughout the company, harmonizing the governance of support services and simplifying the end to end change management process across the entire value chain of the “new Solvay”. Given the complexity and criticality of the company’s IT landscape and the impact a single change could have on global business operations, this marks an important step towards the solution quality and availability objectives required.
