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Winesolar: Sustainable Data Driven Agriculture for Vineyards

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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

Iberdrola-logo


With more than 170 years of history, Iberdrola is a Spanish multinational electric utility company based in Bilbao, global energy leader, committed to clean energy, as a fundamental pillar for building its clean, reliable and intelligent business model. 
This innovative and sustainable project is driven by a consortium of companies including wine producers González Byass, leading clean and renewable energy provider Iberdrola, PVH as a manufacturer of solar panel trackers and structures, and Avvale as the technology expert responsible for sensor data collection, circular business experts, software and machine learning applications.

The goal was to create a symbiotic ecosystem where technology and nature converge, resulting in a renewable energy source for wine producers and ensuring a sustainable future for the Spanish wine industry.
Agrovoltaics seeks to maximize the synergies between agricultural production and photovoltaic production, with the best possible use of land use. In this particular case, the priority of the project is to enable the ideal conditions for the quality of the grapes, now that climate change is affecting crops. For this reason, the integration of PV in the vineyard is sought in a way that maximizes agrovoltaic energy production and the quality of the product. In addition to this improvement in the growing conditions, there is also the symbiosis mentioned above, offering the possibility of increasing the solar power installed in the country thanks to these cultivated lands and in turn offering a benefit both to the company (in this case, González Byass) by covering part or all of its demand with renewable energy and feeding the surplus into the grid, with the consequent benefit that this can have on them, and to the electricity system, by promoting the increase in renewable generation that contributes to combating climate change.

The usage of this video is authorized by Iberdrola  –  Source: Financial Times

The Challenge

Farming is a vital sector that increasingly faces climate change conditions.
In response to the challenges posed by warmer temperatures and extreme weather events affecting grape composition and growing conditions, this pioneering agrovoltaic project aims to enhance grape quality while promoting the sustainability of the crop.
 
In addition to climate conditions, the usage of precision and more intensive agriculture has increased CO2 emissions, so our customers wanted to set-up a project of wine production with zero-emissions, in order to reduce the environmental impact of the energy they’re using, to optimize the use of land and take advantage of the energy produced.
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The Approach

A highly technological ecosystem has been created within a farm to enable the crops to thrive while harnessing renewable energy. In order to do so, our client would need the power of artificial intelligence, software applied to IoT / sensors and cutting-edge solar panels to exploit the elements and create a sustainable renewable energy resource for the rural farming outlet.

First fundamental step was the installation of mobile solar panels to produce CO2 free energy and provide shade to the plants.  A further crucial step was the installation of various sensors which detect relevant information such as: leaves temperature, average temperature, relative humidity. The sensors also collect data about the soil condition in order to optimize the irrigation and an dendrometer sensor provides information about the level of “activity” of the plant by measuring the trunk diameter variation.

Together with Iberdrola, PVHardware, and Gonzalez Byass, Avvale plays the role of the technology expert in this ambitious project: collecting all the sensors’ data and leveraging artificial intelligence, we determine the best position of the solar panels to absorb energy and provide crop cover for the vines and the best growth conditions for the yard, creating data-driven and sustainable vineyards. 

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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

The Winesolar project has pursued the creation of a sustainable agricultural ecosystem that creates conditions for higher quality grapes in a more arid climate than usual due to climate change, reduces traditional energy and water consumption, and promotes a renewable energy resource for the vineyard and the electricity system. The expected impact is to at least maintain crop quality despite the consequences of climate change and a significant CO2 emissions reduction. 

While improving the quality of grapes the project aims to reduce the negative consequences of climate change, by making progress in the decarbonisation of the wine producers activity and keep on decreasing energy costs.

A future goal is to replicate this ecosystem in other vineyards around Spain, which accounts for 13% of the world’s vineyards and can absolutely generate a global positive impact.

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