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SAP fuels end-to-end management for Gas Station Franchise
If you’ve made a pit stop along a road trip, chances are you have visited our client, a family-owned franchise of truck stop and convenience stores located throughout the United States. According to Forbes, they rank in the top 25 largest privately held companies in the world, with over $14 billion in revenues and more than 15,000 employees.
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 To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.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.
The Challenge
Our client used a dual landscape scenario that supports maintenance operations and new developments in parallel. They needed a solution that allowed management of new and incremental changes, without overlapping and impacting live business operations.
Given the company’s growing size and the rising complexity of its IT landscape, our client realized it needed an integrated solution that enables centralized tracking, monitoring and end-to-end management of issues, enhancements, and requests. They sought a way to capture and track employee-reported issues at a level consistent with Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standards.
The Approach
We created a company-wide ticketing system and an audit-proof change management workflow using SAP’s Solution Manager Service Desk and Change Request Management (ChaRM). These SolMan utilities contain the ability to tightly integrate with the company’s SAP ERP and reporting systems, allowing our client to fully leverage the Solution Manager already in place and connect to the company’s landscapes. The implemented solutions now allow for centralized, smooth governance of 10 SAP landscapes, serving nearly 15,000 users.
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 client can manage and resolve software-related issues while moving their enhancements through landscapes into go-live, fully compliant to ITIL standards thanks to regulatory control and consistency checks. By leveraging ChaRM’s tool, Retrofit, they are able to automate manual steps and streamline changes.
Appropriate issue tracking enables our client to anticipate challenges and respond efficiently. Effective change management reduces risks of the enhancements moving through their software landscape and impacting production systems. Ultimately, the company is able to achieve seamless project go-lives without affecting production systems. The successful implementation opens the door for further adoption of SAP Solution Manager functionality, including future plans for digital transformation.
