The Future of Interaction with Service Stations
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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 an Italian multinational energy company headquartered in Rome, which has grown to become one of the largest integrated energy companies globally. Its activities span from the extraction of oil and natural gas to chemistry and biochemistry, as well as the production and distribution of electricity from fossil fuels, cogeneration, and renewables.
The Challenge
Our client has always been dedicated to providing its customers with the most advanced and intuitive user experiences. For this reason, in 2014, the company embarked on an innovation journey with the Avvale team, culminating in the development of a groundbreaking mobile application for fuel payments. Over time, both customers and their needs have evolved, prompting the company to transition from merely introducing a new purchasing method to the ambition of digitizing the entire customer experience. The goal was to centralize the entire range of services offered by its fuel stations into a single app. This standardization would be implemented consistently across the entire country and, looking ahead, throughout the European territory.
The development of the application presented two main challenges. On one hand, there was the technical complexity of a heterogeneous solution composed of processes distributed across multiple components that needed integration and governance. On the other hand, as a platform intended for end customers, it required a high level of reliability and prompt proactivity in resolving any issues.
The Approach
Recognizing the significant innovation potential, the Avvale team has developed a mobile application leveraging AWS cloud services, ensuring an unprecedented user experience at the stations through an intuitive interface for accessing connected digital services.
The application simplifies payments by offering a wide range of options, including credit cards, fuel cards, and other integrated external payment methods. It automates the electronic invoice transmission process for VAT-registered users.In addition to payments, the app enables users to join fully digital loyalty programs, eliminating traditional plastic cards and simplifying the reward-earning process. This new system introduces gamification elements, enabling customers to receive vouchers from both the company (oil and non-oil) and external partners.
The application extends beyond refueling. In the energy transition context, it enables users to locate electric charging stations, book charging, and complete payment through the app. Additionally, it provides integrated services for booking and paying for our client’s specific parking and stops in blue parking areas.
Apart from customer-facing features, the app has been designed considering the complex characteristics of the backend system responsible for orchestrating and managing various digital services. This involves integrating automation systems (service stations, electric charging stations, and parking spaces), banking systems, digital wallets, CRM systems for managing marketing campaigns and loyalty, and identity management systems for controlled access and seamless consumption of services from the other applications of the company.
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
This app plays a crucial role as a strategic tool for our client, significantly contributing to customer acquisition and consolidating the loyalty of existing ones. Indeed, The app offers a seamless digital experience that greatly improves user interaction, reducing processing times, and simplifying operations across various services.
The platform has streamlined the refueling process by providing an intuitive and informative user interface, replacing traditional forecourt terminals for payment and dispenser selection. Real-time monitoring of operations empowers customers with control over their loyalty profile and transaction visibility, fostering interaction transparency.
Furthermore, the application has enabled the implementation of an advanced reward system by closely integrating with the company's business partners, granting customers access to a wide range of rewards within a gamified experience.
In conclusion, Avvale's team has transformed a mere payment app into a comprehensive, cutting-edge solution. Now, users can unlock a broad array of additional services, going beyond the simple act of fuel payment.
