Founded in 1959 by a mechanical engineer who decided to invent a better golf club, PING is a privately held company that employs 1,200 people and produces several hundreds of thousands of golf clubs every year with exports to 65 countries around the globe.
Challenge
PING selected Microsoft Dynamics AX as the company’s worldwide strategic ERP platform in order to integrate it into PING’s Customer Service (PCS) system. The Microsoft Dynamics AX platform is a scalable solution, extremely flexible, easy to use and support, and can be customised using Dynamics’ out-of-the box toolset. The company’s version of Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 was not the latest iteration, so it needed upgrading to ensure future extensibility and ongoing support. The PCS system handles customer orders, processing, manufacturing and shipping, so dovetailing this with the latest AX Platform, v 5.0, would ensure PING could fully utilise the platform for Finance, Procurement and Inventory in tandem.
Kent Crossland, Director Of Information Systems, PING, commented, “We recognised the need to upgrade the platform to take advantage of further technical benefits in the near future and to ensure we were fully supported, especially as this is a global system and in essence, the conduit for sales processing, manufacturing and shipping. Our business wouldn’t be able to function successfully without it.”
Due to the global requirements of the project, PING required a global partner that would support each of their regional offices throughout the upgrade, support and deliver future enhancements of the solution and ensure ‘business as usual’ activity.
Kent Crossland, commented, “We were looking for one partner that could deliver in the UK, Japan and the US (Phoenix, Arizona), as we didn’t want to work with different partners who would have differing views. We wanted a joined up and consolidated approach. Initially, we had two potential names on the table, but one partner couldn’t support our needs or scale effectively. Hitachi Solutions was the best choice. They had the global presence and credibility and we trusted their ability to rapidly increase capacity and their expertise.”
Solution
Hitachi Solutions delivered the project using its Consensus delivery methodology for Microsoft Dynamics. This tried and tested, five phase methodology is structured in such a way as to ensure that projects are delivered in a structured and business led approach, while mitigating the inherent risks associated with ERP projects.
Hitachi Solutions has a global presence and with local experts present across the UK, US and Japan, the project benefitted from Hitachi’s proven and coordinated consultancy approach, with teams collaborating and communicating in each territory to ensure the project deliverables were being met.
Tony Burton, European Finance Manager, PING Europe, commented, “Hitachi Solutions exceeded our expectations. The quality of their experience and professionalism was very impressive and the team worked well to support each local rollout and any local issues.”
Having successfully completed the upgrade to v 5.0, PING has now engaged with Hitachi Solutions to rollout further procurement, inventory and purchasing functionality within the UK. The new functionality will provide much greater visibility of customer orders and the entire process cycle and will enable PING to produce regular, automated reports as well as customized ad hoc reports to assess performance and service levels against defined KPIs. The upgraded system can cope with its users, which has reached well over the one hundred mark spanning the UK, US and Japan and its current 2000 transactions a day, and can be extended with further back office integration.
Benefits
Reduced manual processes and improved efficiency.
The new upgraded solution has significantly reduced the manual effort involved in PING’s query management processes and has enabled the business to define and control the management of customer queries more efficiently, providing greater visibility.
Kent Crossland commented, “We’re seeing improvements in key areas and can now quantify the overall position of queries into the business. The system allows us to direct resource to support demand. It has also reduced the administrative overhead in supporting and controlling our existing KPIs and SLAs.”
Improved reporting
The upgraded and fully supported PCS system provides much greater visibility of customer queries across all departments on a global scale. It enables PING to produce regular, automated and standardized reports as well as customized ad hoc reports to assess performance and service levels against defined KPIs.
“The upgraded system has made regular monitoring and reporting of KPIs and SLAs a lot easier. It provides us with a truer indication of what is going on in the business and the time taken to produce reports is much quicker,” said Kent Crossland.
Scalable solution
The PCS system can cope with hundreds of users, and can be ex-tended with further back office integration. Kent Crossland commented, “The system has been a catalyst for process change. Hitachi’s consultants have an in-depth knowledge of the Microsoft Dynamics product set. They understood how it would fit with what we wanted to achieve and how to deliver it quickly and efficiently. Their workshop led approach enabled them to identify salient points much earlier than I had anticipated. It worked very well.”
Fast, effective delivery
With a proven and structured approach and best practice guidelines, Hitachi Solutions can shortcut design cycles and deliver implementations within a uniformed structure. As a result, the PING implementation was completed within its challenging timescales across three geographies, the UK, the US and Japan.
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