Ping, the maker of customized golf clubs and equipment, set out to unify its supply chain planning function and achieve end-to-end visibility with the help of John Galt Solutions. We get the story from Scott Niemann, forecasting manager with Ping, and Matt Hoffman, vice president of product and industry solutions with John Galt.
Ping is a leading manufacturer of golf equipment, based in Phoenix, Arizona, with additional production sites around the world. Its challenge, says Niemann, was the need “to house demand and supply plans in one central location.” The company wanted to be able to see data flow from a high-level demand forecast all the way to component procurement.
Ping lacked such visibility in the past. It had a number of disjointed legacy systems and processes, including Excel workbooks, which didn’t “speak” to one another. In addition, the company wanted its demand planners, who are domiciled in the marketing department, to see how their forecasts flowed down to their supply partners for ultimate purchasing of components, “and have input and signoff on what those buys would look like.”
The company looked at a number of planning software providers, asking them to demonstrate how they could provide visibility all the way to the component level, before settling on John Galt. “It became clear that they were the ones for us,” Niemann says.
Hoffman says John Galt brought to the initiative its extensive experience in supporting similar planning challenges with other customers. “We had a lot of familiarity in making this work without having to do customization,” he says. Niemann calls the effort “an extreme undertaking,” result in planners finally being able to get a handle on how forecasts reverberated throughout Ping’s supply chain.
Today, Niemann says, Ping’s demand and supply planning are housed in the same place, with the forecast and assembly plan flowing smoothly into the material and components plan. Demand planners remain in the loop, he adds, seeing how their recommendations were translated into purchasing. “We like a more circular input,” he says.