CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
7 April 2008
Implementation Investments
Callaway Golf Improves Collaboration Internally — and Across Continents — With Microsoft Solution, Helping Innovate New Products Faster
Callaway Golf recently implemented a Web-based portal using UGS Teamcenter Community Collaboration, a product life-cycle management solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. With the new solution, Callaway Golf personnel and its value chain partners overseas can share documents, and collaborate, ultimately helping Callaway Golf innovate and bring products to market faster.
Carlsbad, Calif.-based Callaway Golf is known for innovation, and introduces seven to eight new products annually. Designing and launching new products at this pace requires tight coordination between design teams, engineers, marketing staff and lawyers. In addition, these teams need to communicate and exchange critical business information, such as large files created with computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software, with partners in China, Japan, Korea, Mexico and Taiwan that manufacturer the product components.
“We live or die by our CAD/CAM software, so the integration UGS provided was crucial,” said John Loo, senior manager of Design Systems at Callaway Golf. “SharePoint gave us what we needed, and because we are very Microsoft-centric in terms of our desktop PCs, applications and development tools, we felt that it would be the best fit for our needs.”
With the new collaboration solution, Callaway Golf has streamlined workflow processes between highly dispersed teams of employees and manufacturers, ensuring the teams are all working from a single framework. The technology helps make the collaborative process of bringing new products to market much more efficient. It also helps speed access to data and also fosters innovation through faster and clearer communication.
Teamcenter Community Collaboration is a product life-cycle management solution from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner UGS, a subsidiary of Siemens. The content management capability of Teamcenter Community Collaboration helps Callaway Golf control changes made to product content by providing document and version histories and e-mail alerts.
“We have design teams in California and suppliers in Asia, but everyone is able to collaborate effectively by posting their product content on the portal and keeping track of what’s being done on specific projects. The technology has allowed us to get away from using e-mail to send thousands of files to hundreds of people, and reduces time, travel and errors,” Loo said.
Information residing on the Callaway Golf portal is accessible 24 hours a day, eliminating the barriers created in the past by time zones and physical barriers. On a typical business day, 200 different users will log on to access documents and collaborate with people.
“With global teams continuously working on new products across categories and price points, Callaway Golf needed a more efficient means of sharing, accessing and managing information,” said George Taylor, director of U.S. consumer goods industry solutions at Microsoft. “Microsoft, working with UGS, provides a solution that empowers employees and partners to streamline the new-product development process and improve supply chain synchronization, speeding data access for many departments and ensuring a more collaborative and innovative environment.”
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