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Large producer of steel trusses implements SAP S/4HANA, combining global strategy and local compliance
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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 pioneering leader in the design, manufacturing, and installation of high-quality steel lattice towers for energy and telecommunications sectors. With a steadfast commitment to innovation, engineering excellence, and sustainable solutions, the company has established itself as a prominent player in Brazil's rapidly evolving infrastructure landscape.
The Challenge
Navigating the complex terrain of sectors such as those this company operates in presents a number of business process management challenges. From orchestrating raw material supply to delivering the final product, these complexities span diverse domains.
Recognizing this dynamic, our client underscores the paramount significance of robust solutions harmonized with adept partners. The goal was to ensure seamless alignment with established global processes and guidelines, providing essential guidance for best-practice implementation tailored to the unique Brazilian context. The organization’s exponential growth and the complexity of managing extensive operations highlighted the need for an advanced ERP system that could provide uniformity and integration across all business processes while complying with local regulatory requirements.
The Approach
In response to these critical challenges, the company partnered with Avvale to implement SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud. This choice was driven by the need for a comprehensive, scalable, and sustainable ERP solution that could meet both global and local requirements.
Avvale's approach to supporting the client's global IT stood out in the seamless implementation of SAP S/4HANA in the customer model for the Brazilian industrial plant. With meticulous attention to detail, we adeptly implement the finest localization practices, ensuring a harmonious integration of the model within the local context. Avvale's specialized team navigated complexities by leveraging our expertise to optimize processes, uphold quality, and align the model with the specific requirements of the Brazilian landscape. This involved integrating Thomson Reuters' solution for streamlined issuance of material and service invoices, accurate tax reporting (SPEDs), and automation of entry processes, ensuring efficiency and precision in all operations. By harmonizing global strategy with local compliance, Avvale facilitated a seamless transition from batch processes to online integration within the ERP system, enabling instantaneous information dissemination to both headquarters and local management.
The result is a successful synergy between global innovation and localized excellence, setting a new benchmark in cross-border implementation.
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
The adoption of SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud has transformed the company's operations, providing a unified and future-oriented ERP system. By rolling out this solution and harmonizing practices across locations, we ensured operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and sustained growth in compliance with both company and global industry standards.
This transformation has enabled the company to achieve significant benefits, such as:
- Automation of tax calculation for inbound and outbound transactions.
- Implementation of a global strategy for purchase requisition and approval.
- Real-time visibility of global inventory, particularly for common raw materials.
- Integration with local municipalities for service invoice issuance.
- Transition from batch processes to online integration within the ERP system.
- Instantaneous information dissemination both to headquarters and local management.
- Group-wide financial consolidation; enhanced effectiveness in function segregation and data security.
By adopting a global model of logistics and production control and at the same time adhering to Brazilian legal standards, our client has set a new benchmark in international implementation.
