PING: One stroke ahead of the rest

Before the days of active data warehousing,
PING was busy perfecting its data swing.

by Debra Aho Williamson

A company culture driven by product quality and innovation. An emphasis on customization. Exemplary customer service. These characteristics have helped make PING one of the premier golf club manufacturers in the United States.

Founded in 1959 by Karsten Solheim, a General Electric engineer who wanted to improve his game, PING now holds more than 400 patents. It revolutionized the golf club market in 1962 by introducing a putter that was weighted on both the heel and the toe to resist twisting. Later in the '60s, the company introduced custom fitting to give each player a unique club.

Today, PING is taking customization to a whole new level. Any golfer can visit a pro shop or golf retailer in the United States, Canada or Europe and have one of PING's 5,000 factory-trained fitters take measurements such as height and hand size, observe a golfer's stroke, then determine which materials, club models and grips will help the golfer improve his or her game.

In 30 minutes, the fitter can generate specifications for a customized club or set of clubs. From there, the information is sent to PING, which makes the clubs, complete with unique serial numbers, in just 48 hours.

The innovation doesn't stop there, though. If a golfer loses or breaks a club, replacement is simple. Because PING tracks every club it makes via the unique serial number, all the golfer has to do is tell PING which club to replace. PING can call up the specifications in its database and make an exact duplicate, shipping it to the golfer in 48 hours or less.

"It's amazing how much people value that," says Kent Crossland, PING's director of information systems. "They call us, and we're able to build an exact replica. That gives the golfer's (clubs) integrity." And integrity is exactly what pro golfers like Heath Slocum, Mark Calcavecchia, Daniel Chopra and Maria Hjorth have come to enjoy with their PING clubs.

What's the secret behind PING's stroke of manufacturing genius? Teradata, of course.

The PING way
PING has depended on Teradata for nearly every facet of its business since 1989. From the start, PING has been what Crossland calls a "strange" Teradata customer. It does things the PING way, which is and always has been unique.

Instead of extracting data from an operational system and running queries in a separate database, the company wanted a single database for both operational transactions and decision support. PING installed Teradata running on a massively parallel NCR processing server to help the company accomplish its goal of managing orders and fulfillment while providing decision-support capabilities.

PING's 1989 Teradata implementation was unique in that respect, Crossland says, because the system was somewhat of an anomaly among early data warehouses. But that very effective structure remains in its Teradata implementation today. The system supports every major business function, including production scheduling, shipping, and billing and customer service.

"We have a single database that we are using both for day-to-day operations and decision support," says Crossland, a 21-year veteran of PING. "The track record of reliability and performance that we have experienced has given us the confidence to integrate the Teradata system throughout our entire process. Teradata is supporting everything that has to do with our interaction with a customer."

Problems of data conversion, data versioning and synchronization simply "don't exist," Crossland says. "We have a single database image of all of our order processing. That's what's crazy about our implementation. We've combined operational data and the data warehouse, and most people don't think in those terms. Here, we don't realize that's not the way it should be done."

This early implementation of an active data warehouse integrates with the business seamlessly. When a serial number is etched onto a club, that number is recorded in Teradata. When a box of clubs is weighed for shipping, that information also feeds into Teradata. In fact, everything about every order is tracked, and now PING has more than 15 years of customer data in Teradata.

PING can carry out complex queries on its database to optimize production. The system's rapid response time gives PING's Teradata users instant access to information for quick decision-making. Production planners can track and forecast demand for a particular kind of club. Sales associates can get easy updates of sales activities, and customer service representatives can find out exactly when an order will be shipped.

More than 350 users rely on the Teradata Warehouse on a regular basis. Only a few are actual data analysts; the vast majority of users-executives, managers and other decision makers-use it to simply do their day-to-day jobs.

The system is so reliable and simple to use that a single part-time database administrator can manage everything related to the database.

Need for speed
Not so long ago, PING spent six to eight weeks building and delivering a customized set of golf clubs. It was a way to create mystique around the products by making them difficult to obtain, notes Crossland. But that system doesn't fly in today's rapid-fire economy, so PING came up with a 48-hour initiative.

PING credits Teradata for its ability to rapidly customize and ship clubs. Using the Teradata platform, PING created a real-time production scheduling engine that guides the order and manufacturing process from start to finish. And because of Teradata's reliability, PING was able to transform its production and delivery timeline in just a few months.

PING's club components all have individual weights and specifications, so the number of combinations is limitless. During the first six months of 2004, the company shipped more than 50,000 configurations of PING irons-and that's not even 5% of the overall volume.

"We took the functionality Teradata gave us and built an entire marketing program around it," Crossland says. "Teradata is integral to that process."

In fact, PING hopes to make its production system one notch better. It's now considering moving to a 24-hour turnaround, Crossland says. He's confident that the Teradata system can support such a move, but challenges remain in terms of human resources and production management.

Of course, quality is crucial to PING. Its JAS putter, for example, undergoes a complex milling process that involves more than 40 tool changes. PING won't move to a faster turnaround until it can find a way to streamline its manufacturing process without jeopardizing quality.

Expanding the game
It may be surprising to learn that a company as innovative as PING has yet to use a Web-automated order process. But according to Crossland, there's been less demand for automation in the golf retail business, where small independent shops dominate, than in other retail areas. Still, the company recognizes the value of Web-based services, so it's using Teradata to support a range of Internet activities.

A portion of the company's Web site (www.pinggolf.com) is now devoted to the "PING Community," a place where golfers can register their clubs and receive information on new products. All the data feeds into the Teradata system, where it can be analyzed.

PING is also extending its Teradata-supported order processing system to a new Web site, www.pinggolf.biz (see "The great .NET migration"). The site is a customer service portal enabling pro shops and golf retail stores to check the status of orders. Eventually, PING will add online ordering and payment capabilities.

In addition to expanding its Web presence, PING is working to integrate its European and Asian operations into the Teradata system. The goal is for distributors in Germany, Sweden, France and Spain to be able to input their orders and for PING's U.K. assembly plant to ship directly to customers.

"We want to be able to support PING operations wherever they are around the globe," Crossland says. To accomplish that, PING may upgrade its Teradata system to include more capacity. PING is also considering adding a second node to provide not only increased capacity, but also redundancy in case a node fails.

The good news is that Teradata has been so reliable that it hasn't really been necessary to add a second node, Crossland says. "To this point in time we have not found anything else that can provide for us what Teradata provides. Clearly, we couldn't accomplish what we do without the performance and reliability we have experienced with Teradata." T

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