PING

PING has been manufacturing innovative golf equipment for more than 50 years. In order to stay at the forefront of new product development and reduce time-to-market, PING initiated a new, collaborative approach to product development. However, to fully embrace its new product development methodology, the company needed an improved enterprisewide collaboration solution and a better search tool for its employees. PING chose a communication and collaboration solution from Microsoft, which also has an integrated search component. Today, PING employees use the solution to easily find and share product information—and bring the collaborative product development approach to fruition. As a result, PING is producing more products and reducing time-to-market. The company expects to become more competitive, a key advantage in today’s tough retail environment.

Situation

The origins of golf equipment manufacturer PING can be traced back to 1959, when mechanical engineer Karsten Solheim, frustrated with his putting, took to the family garage and designed the 1A putter, which made a “pinging” sound when striking a ball. By 1967, Solheim was creating golf equipment full-time, and he incorporated the PING company that year.

Since then, Solheim’s insistence on adhering to strict engineering principles and tight manufacturing tolerances helped raise the level of product performance and quality throughout the golf industry. Numerous PING innovations in golf equipment have become industry standards, including perimeter weighting, custom fitting, and the use of investment casting (a metal-forming technique) in the manufacturing of golf clubs. Solheim, who passed away in 2000, is the only person to be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame as a golf club manufacturer. Today, the Phoenix, Arizona–based company is under the direction of Solheim’s youngest son, John A. Solheim.

“Our mission is to provide unquestioned leadership in product design, service, and quality,” says Dan Shoenhair, Director of Analysis and Testing at PING. “PING offers a unique approach to custom fitting, which allows the golfer to perform at his or her best. We do this by engineering adjustable product components that are tailored to individual players.”

Product innovation drives competitive advantage and builds brand loyalty, two factors that are key in any market but are especially so in today’s challenging retail environment. In the golf industry, product innovation is mission-critical. “More than three-fourths of our business comes from product developed within the last two years,” explains Shoenhair.

“Both the U.S. and international golf markets have been relatively flat, and we are seeing increased competition in the marketplace,” confirms Brad Schweigert, Director of Product Design at PING. “Today, there’s a lot more product segmentation, and PING has to respond by building more products and bringing them to market faster. These competitive pressures in the market forced us to change our approach to product development.”

Lengthy Design Process
PING had been using a lengthy, iterative, design-and-test methodology that began with a design proposal and proceeded through testing and prototyping until an optimal solution was reached. “To shorten this cycle, we wanted to turn that process around to a ‘test-and-design’ methodology,” says Schweigert. “First, we study the relationships that exist between components of a golf club and between that club and a golfer. Then we set up experiments to map out these physical principles and create limit curves that define their relationships. Once we understand the variables and we have done all the testing, the designer steps in to more quickly create a winning design.”

Poor Search and Collaboration
However, PING’s existing IT infrastructure did not optimally support the new approach to innovation. Key testing and product data was integrated inside the company’s computer-aided design (CAD) software. Armed only with keyword search, engineers wasted time combing through the database, looking for product data. “A lot of our test results were filed away, and if we wanted to go back and look at past results, we had to search through an electronic filing system that required the user to know the test number,” says Shoenhair. “This was not typically remembered after the fact, which didn’t help our goal to create more products, more quickly.”

Neither did the existing IT infrastructure fully support the level of collaboration that PING required to develop products efficiently and stay ahead of the market. Efficient product development requires seamless collaboration among many departments, yet PING did not have a good solution for collaborating across the enterprise. For example, test engineers had no way of reviewing finite element analyses results with their colleagues, so they had to send reports back and forth as e-mail attachments. Manufacturing and product engineers worked inside their product database and CAD systems; however, if they wanted to communicate with other departments—for example, to submit a bill of materials to purchasing—they had to log on to a different system.

“At PING, we always look for a solution that can serve more than one group within the company to maximize IT investments and reduce administrative overhead,” says Eric Hart, End-User Computing Manager at PING. “We wanted a unified communication and collaboration platform our employees could use to find information and work together across the enterprise.”

Solution

PING found the solution it was looking for with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and its integrated enterprise search feature. The company evaluated other solutions but chose a Microsoft option because of the product’s out-of-the-box functionality, extensibility, and wide range of capabilities. “With SharePoint Server, we can incorporate not only search and document collaboration, but also workflow and application development to help address all the different needs that we have,” says Hart. 

PING wanted to develop an intuitive solution for business users and was able to do so because the usability of Office SharePoint Server 2007 matched the company’s expectations for long-term value and ease of use for all employees. Office SharePoint Server 2007 works with programs in the Microsoft Office system, so employees can continue to work within a familiar user interface as they create, edit, and share documents or spreadsheets on SharePoint sites. “We wanted to enable our employees to adapt the environment to suit changing business needs,” says Hart. “We were able to achieve that design criterion with Office SharePoint Server 2007 and still develop a really powerful, extensible solution.”

The IT department began deployment in January 2008 and finished by April 2008. It was important for PING that its IT staff didn’t have to devote additional resources to customizing the solution. As it turned out, PING was able to achieve its goals for collaboration and search using standard features of Office SharePoint Server 2007. “The initial implementation of SharePoint Server was quite smooth for us,” says Shoenhair.

The team migrated more than 7,000 documents into their new intranet collaboration portal. The team also took the opportunity to build an intuitive navigational architecture for the site. “Using Office SharePoint Server 2007, we designed the site to make more sense for our employees by consolidating our knowledge base and organizing the data so that people from different disciplines, such as engineering, marketing, and purchasing, can see the information grouped in a very intuitive fashion,” says Schweigert. “This allows the entire team to stay plugged in and work together. On top of that, we can use the enterprise search capability to drill into the knowledge stores and retrieve the exact information we need.” 

During the migration, the team eliminated redundant information and applied custom metadata to documents so that employees can use refined filtering and enhanced query syntax for full-text and property-based searches. For example, because the team set up metadata fields for all the variable components in the product database, engineers can filter their queries according to various components and the relationships between those components and others. “The filtering is wonderful because now we are not relying on keywords,” says Schweigert. “To narrow your results, you can filter by test types, variables, and properties such as author, type of document, or date.”

Because the collaboration portal acts as a centralized hub for corporate and product information, employees are turning to the solution to facilitate document-centric workflows. For example, engineers can create a bill of materials and save it in the SharePoint site, where it’s accessible for employees in the purchasing department to access and process. 

Today, Office SharePoint Server 2007 is actively used by dozens of employees across PING. “Deployment was a great experience because we have had such a positive reaction from employees,” says Shoenhair. “Because the product is so intuitive, people are able to find their data and collaborate very easily.” 

“Now we are on a unified platform that everybody can use,” adds Hart. “People are not moving between systems and screens to share information. In IT, we were looking for a solution that could reach everyone but would also minimize training and overhead. SharePoint Server was a perfect fit.”

Benefits

For any IT department, it is gratifying to find a flexible, cost-effective solution that supports a company’s key business strategies. PING needed a more efficient, collaborative product development methodology so that it could withstand today’s challenging economic and retail environment, as well as build long-term competitive advantage. However, it lacked the search and collaboration tools that its employees needed to bring the new product test-and-design methodology to life. So the IT department deployed a collaboration solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007. Today, PING employees are using Office SharePoint Server 2007 to improve their access to information and collaborate effectively. As a result, PING is seeing the benefits of its new product development approach through better opportunities for innovation and accelerated time-tomarket.

“For PING, bringing innovative products to market is mission-critical,” says Shoenhair. “By using SharePoint Server, we’re achieving this more quickly so we can build a competitive edge.”

Improving Information Access
Efficient, relevant search results are helping PING employees amplify the benefit of the company’s new collaboration solution and design methodology. Since starting to use metadata filtering, employees have significantly reduced the time and effort required to access the information they need.

“Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps us support the paradigm shift that we’re implementing with our ‘test-then-design’ product development,” says Schweigert. “Designers use metadata filtering to find data on specific product components, which we are constantly improving in our quest to assemble the best custom-fit clubs for our customers. So it’s important for our designers to be able to drill down and use these search tools to find data on the product components and the relationships between components.”

Fostering Collaboration
Employees using Office SharePoint Server 2007 are thriving in a collaborative product development environment. For example, a new SharePoint Server–based workflow streamlines the test-review cycle. When a test request is posted on the site, a test engineer performs the test and then posts the results back on the site. “The workflow in SharePoint Server automatically notifies design engineers that their results are ready to view,” says Schweigert. “They can concentrate on the testing, and the design engineer can provide feedback quickly. We also use SharePoint Server to collaborate on the patent process and to develop our knowledge briefs.”

Building Opportunities for Innovation
Employees at PING are using their improved search and collaboration capabilities to brainstorm and drive the creative process. Part of the ability to generate new ideas comes from easy access to the company’s valuable knowledge stores. “The information we have represents a springboard to future ideas,” says Shoenhair. “In engineering, the reuse of information is critical, not only as a record of our innovation, but also because it saves people from retesting or working out a problem that’s already been solved.”

“SharePoint Server promotes innovation,” adds Schweigert. “We use it to see what the other engineers are working on and to comment on their progress. This promotes the growth of new ideas.”

Reducing Time-to-Market
Thanks to the improved collaboration and search capabilities delivered by Office SharePoint Server 2007, PING has successfully launched a new collaborative product development environment that’s improving output and reducing the time it takes to bring its products to market.

“Approximately 8 years ago, we were producing about 3 families of products per year, and at that time it took about 24 months to bring a product to market,” recalls Shoenhair. “In 2008, after deploying Office SharePoint Server 2007, we produced 16 families of products, with a time-to-market of 9 or 10 months. And we have done that with approximately the same number of people in engineering over that period of time. The efficiency gains have been astounding.”

For the IT department at PING, Office SharePoint Server 2007 helped to solidify its reputation for providing solutions that add real value to the business. “The PING IT department is helping our business stay competitive by enabling our engineers to focus on designing great golf clubs, not on their technology tools,” says Hart. “Microsoft solutions suit our needs today, and the great thing is we know they will expand with us to help PING remain at the forefront of innovation.”