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Gottardo and GenAI: Automation Meets Intelligence

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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

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Founded in 1969 as a small family business in the heart of Veneto, Gottardo S.p.A. is now a national leader in the distribution of home and personal care products, with over 5,700 employees and a broad network of locations throughout Italy. Its mission is to continue growing and innovating, guiding the company into the future through modern, sustainable solutions.

The Challenge

Gottardo’s treasury team had to manage hundreds of banking documents daily from multiple sources, certified email, traditional email, and online banking,each with different formats, rules, and content. The archiving process was entirely manual and required renaming, classifying, and uploading each file, resulting in a significant time burden and limited traceability.

The presence of several banks, each providing multiple types of documents, made the process so demanding that it couldn’t be performed consistently. As a result, the centralized digital archive was incomplete, limiting the ability to quickly retrieve the documents needed.

Building on the success of previous collaborations, Gottardo chose to partner with Avvale to redesign the archiving process and create a comprehensive, continuously updated, and long-term manageable repository through a flexible and scalable solution.

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The Approach

Avvale adopted a consultative and collaborative approach with a clear goal: to build an intelligent archiving process that minimizes manual effort and improves the quality of stored information.

To address the complexity of the context, Avvale and Gottardo designed a solution based on UiPath, Document Understanding, and Generative AI, capable of automatically interpreting documents with varying formats and content.

Thanks to generative intelligence, the system can recognize even complex information, adapting to structural, formatting, or positional variations within the same document category. The solution was configured to fully support all required document types, ensuring a complete and stable model that provides control, consistency, and high-quality archived information. By combining expertise in automation and artificial intelligence, Avvale enabled Gottardo to transform a time-intensive activity into an efficient, transparent digital process aligned with the company’s sustainability vision.

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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 new archiving system will reshape how Gottardo’s treasury team manages banking documents, making the process fully automated and easily controlled. Every day, dozens of files are now classified, processed, and stored consistently, ensuring accuracy and operational continuity.

Data quality will increase significantly: each document is now enriched with specific metadata that previously wasn’t captured, improving traceability and simplifying internal analysis. The risk of error will be drastically reduced, while the document repository has already become a single, orderly, and reliable source of truth.

This new system stands out for its flexibility: it can easily handle format variations or new banking institutions, requiring only minimal adjustments without disrupting operations. Gottardo’s goal is a more modern, informed model of document management, fully aligned with the organization’s vision for digital sustainability.

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