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Unieuro: Redefining Retail Operations with AI-Powered Automation

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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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

logo-unieuro

Unieuro, Italy’s leading omnichannel retailer of consumer electronics and appliances, connects millions of B2C customers each year through over 500 stores and the e-commerce platform. With more than 5,000 employees, Unieuro combines innovation, proximity, and service excellence.

The Challenge

Can AI make retail operations faster, smarter, and more human?

Across over 500 stores and advanced e-commerce platform, Unieuro manages millions of customer interactions annually. Behind this scale lies a complex web of processes – from purchase orders to invoice processing – that can be time-consuming and prone to error. As customer expectations rise and operational complexity grows, the company recognized the need to evolve its automation journey, moving from process optimization to intelligent orchestration.
Beyond retail operations, critical areas such as procurement, finance, logistics, and IT faced growing complexity. Managing purchase orders, registering domestic and foreign invoices, handling customs duties, and tracking investment projects all relied on repetitive, time-consuming tasks.

The goal was clear: move from rule-based automation (RPA) to context-aware, agentic systems capable of decision-making.

electronics store

The Approach

To tackle these challenges, Avvale guided Unieuro through a wave-based transformation powered by AI and automation. Firstly, we focused on procurement and supply chain, automating purchase order acquisition, loading reminders, cash discrepancies, and store requests. Finance followed, allowing the company to handle investment projects end-to-end. From initial approval to automatic capitalization and amortization. Domestic and international invoices, utility bills, and customs duties were also brought into the automated workflow. Commercial Back-office operations are under transformation, with automated sell-out management, supplier follow-ups, duplicate negotiations, and account reconciliation. Price verification for purchase orders became fully automated, using historical data comparisons and rapid alerts to ensure accuracy, while AI classification tools streamlined the handling of thousands of store requests.

Building on this foundation, Unieuro has evolved an automation originally developed by Avvale in 2021 with classic RPA technology for Purchase Order Management, transforming it into an advanced agentic process that empowers buyers in negotiations and supplier decision-making. The new intelligent layer automates validation, detects price deviations for human review, and effortlessly adapts to evolving procurement strategies through Context Grounding, with every step of the workflow – RPA, Agent, and Human – seamlessly orchestrated by UiPath Maestro.

Every step followed a structured methodology: a discovery of existing processes, a detailed cost-benefit evaluation, careful implementation, and change management sessions with business users to ensure adoption. Unieuro leveraged semantic interpretation algorithms to classify requests, Document Understanding for invoice extraction, and RPA to verify SAP orders, creating a seamless blend of human oversight and machine efficiency. Moreover, in 2024 a joint central governance team (CoE) has been created in Unieuro, focused on digital workforce management.

electronics store

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

Today, Unieuro’s digital workforce operates seamlessly across its business ecosystem. Tasks that once required thousands of manual hours are now managed autonomously by intelligent agents that understand, act, and learn.

The results are tangible: Unieuro’s digital workforce now manages thousands of tasks autonomously, dramatically reducing manual effort and increasing operational agility. Procurement and supply chain tasks dropped from 20 days per month to just 10 hours. Over 100 capital projects were automated annually, producing 10,000 digital assets with real-time tracking dashboards. Finance operations – including foreign invoice and customs fee processing – were reduced from 20 days per month to 11 hours. Price verification and SAP order management became faster and more accurate through automated data comparisons and rapid alerts.

Unieuro’s journey shows that AI doesn’t just automate processes, it elevates them. By transforming complex workflows into seamless, intelligent operations, Unieuro is building a smarter, faster, and more empowered retail organization.

 

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