Trans Austria Gasleitung Moves to AWS to Fuel Innovation and Growth
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Trans Austria Gasleitung (TAG) GmbH is a Transmission System Operator in Austria and the main artery of the natural gas network in central Europe. TAG also delivers about one-third of Italy’s total gas supply. The TAG pipeline network consists of about 1,140 km high-pressure natural gas pipes for the transport of natural gas from the Slovakian/Austrian border to the Austrian/Italian border. More than 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas are transported through the pipeline system of TAG GmbH every year.
The Challenge
To keep pace with growth while optimizing its business-critical workloads, such as a workforce management platform, data management, and reporting applications, TAG needed to upgrade their traditional data centers with limited scalability and significant operational overhead.
TAG was also pursuing a B2B commercial negotiation software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, based on SAP technology and previously provided by a third party, so they needed a reliable infrastructure that could scale applications easily, maintain high availability, and reduce costs.
The Approach
TAG worked with Avvale to define a migration strategy towards AWS Cloud in less than two months. In addition to designing the migration strategy, Avvale analyzed the main needs and the most appropriate native services and architectures.
The migration included the following systems: SAP ERP, a workforce management platform, data management and reporting applications, a commercial dispatching solution, a geographic information system (GIS) applications, the institutional website, and an employee portal.
Since TAG maintains some IT services on-premises to support physical servers located at stations along the pipelines, Avvale recommended an advanced hybrid cloud architecture to efficiently connect cloud and physical environments.
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
By moving to the cloud, TAG gained the scalability and opportunity to deploy on-demand compute capacity when needed, ensuring high availability for business-critical applications and meeting strict SLA parameters.
With on-demand flexibility annual maintenance costs were decreased by more than a third and yearly costs for its formerly on-premises B2B solution were reduced by up to 45%. With improved service levels, TAG developed a dynamic capacity management concept, using scale up/down, autoscaling, start/stop, reservations methodologies, and more serverless computing. Compared to a traditional approach to IT capacity management, this concept has provided a 25% annual savings.
The company began using microservices and Lambda functions to improve the resilience of data automation flows and to develop next-generation data analytics as well as data governance architecture. Additionally, TAG is gradually introducing AWS development tools and processes to maximize the use of AWS managed services.
Overall the introduced IT innovation enabled enhancement of its service delivery as the IT teams could focus more on innovation rather than operations management of IT infrastructure.
