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Telefónica Connects a Direct Line with Spanish Tax Service
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Telefónica is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world and is headquartered in Madrid. Operating in 17 counties, they employ 127,000 people globally. They provide fixed-line and mobile phones, broadband, and subscription television, operating in Europe and the Americas.
The Challenge
In 2017, the Spanish Tax Agency (AEAT) introduced a new value added tax (VAT) management system called Immediate Supply of Information (SII). This management system then established new VAT rules, where companies are required to digitally provide VAT information from their invoices or other accounting documents within four working days of their registration. This process needed to be established within a certain timeframe or there would be monetary penalties.
To meet this new compliance, Telefónica required a solution that would allow all their companies to easily adopt the new regulation while managing the volume of invoices and streamline their current systems.
The Approach
Avvale and Telefónica conducted a detailed analysis of their systems to ensure data quality and compatibility with the AEAT. The B+SII solution streamlined the financial systems used by both companies and restructured data to fit AEAT standards. Avvale created a strategy plan and developed B+SII to integrate different systems, formats, and communication protocols. The solution was tested and integrated with a central dashboard, providing high visibility into the VAT process. The final step of implementation involved uploading billions of records to SII without disrupting daily operations, which was successful. The solution automates the process of sending required reports to AEAT, providing different levels of visibility to different users.
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 the implementation of B+ SII, Telefónica is in compliance with the legal requirements of issuing VAT records immediately to the AEAT electronic office. Users are empowered with increased visibility and receive alerts in case any incidents occur when transferring data to AEAT.
As a company, Telefónica gained a unified platform that is accessible across all entities. This platform is secure and reliable to handle large amounts of data. Additionally, with a single platform, there is a reduction in maintenance and operational costs. This secure environment provides a base for future scalability, the ability to integrate into other systems, and the agility to adapt to any new requirements in the future.
