Zambon implements a new branch system with no impact on operations
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
Zambon is a multinational with a presence in 87 countries and around 3,000 employees worldwide. It operates in the pharmaceutical industry, developing products for pain management, respiratory diseases, Women's Health, neurology, and gastric disorders. With its fourth largest operation based in Brazil, comprising over 300 employees, the company continues to expand its global footprint.
The Challenge
As part of its expansion strategy, in 2022 the company opened a new branch in Brazil, located in the city of Aparecida de Goiânia, in the state of Goiás. To avoid financial and operational impacts, it was crucial to implement SAP S/4HANA with agility and precision.
The organization faced the challenge of ensuring perfect synchronization of its operations and preventing financial and operational disruptions to guarantee the successful launch of the subsidiary in Goiás. To achieve this goal, it became essential to optimize core processes, covering areas such as purchasing, finance, sales, and production. Maintaining the integration of these sectors with the logistics operator was a vital element in this endeavor.
The Approach
Effective communication between Avvale’s team and Zambon's IT department, combined with the SAP system's precise configurations, not only prevented several complications in the project's testing but also boosted the rapid validation of the process. This collaboration was key to ensuring that the deadlines stipulated in the schedule were strictly adhered to.
The implementation scope covered the MM, SD, FI, CO, PP, and GRC/PI modules of SAP S/4HANA at the plant, meticulously aligning with the company's specific demands. The Avvale team, already familiar with Zambon's international operations, played a valuable advisory role by providing strategic insights that were incorporated into the implementation. Avvale’s previous experience supporting Zambon’s operations outside Brazil and maintaining their SAP environments was crucial in this implementation. This familiarity with Zambon's requirements contributed significantly to the success of the 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
Thanks to the commitment and integration between the teams, the implementation of the project was carried out with remarkable precision and efficiency. This resulted in a successful execution within the planned time frame, facilitating a smooth transfer of materials to the new plant.
The agility demonstrated not only ensured operational continuity but also contributed significantly to carrying out a sustainable transition process without adverse commercial and financial impacts. The synchrony between the different stages of the project reflects the synergy between the teams and underscores the effectiveness of the strategic planning adopted.
