Strategic Technology: Product Lifecycle Management Moves Ahead - ' Strategy '

PLM can add value by improving a product's development, time to market, and retirement.
When Alexander Pope wrote that "hope springs eternal," he may well have had golfers in mind. A new putter or the latest wedge can take on -almost mythical proportions in the minds of most golfers, for whom a wide-eyed respect for cutting-edge technology, combined with a fervent desire to cut strokes off their game, translates to a propensity to buy.

Dan Shoenhair, director of engineering at Phoenix-based golf-equipment manufacturer Ping Inc., says, "All golfers have one similarity: They always think the next club will help them play better. We need to continually refresh the line, take advantage of new materials, and make modifications to improve equipment performance. New products are very important to our financial health, and to our competitiveness. Golfers won't buy three-year-old technology if they can buy something new."

Ping and its many rivals face intense competition in the U.S. golf-equipment market, and it's only getting tougher. Golfers are playing fewer rounds than in the past, the number of new golf courses being built each year has declined, and the market for new clubs is stagnant. These market dynamics, combined with inconsistent results from year to year, led Ping to begin pursuing a product lifecycle management strategy five years ago. Ping participates almost exclusively in the market for golf clubs and bags, which represents about a third of the $5.8 billion total U.S. golf-equipment market.

Says Shoenhair: "PLM interested us because we needed to gain efficiency in our computer-aided design, both to increase the number of new products we were bringing to market each year and to cut the time it took to do it." But Ping also foresaw the opportunity to use PLM to harness its resources across the company to get products out the door. "We like the idea of building a knowledge library to make collaboration more efficient and provide access to product data across business functions," he adds.

That, in a nutshell, is the essence of PLM, which AMR Research describes as a strategic approach to creating and managing a company's product-related intellectual capital, from the product's conception to its retirement. PLM can be used to improve both a company's product development processes and its ability to use product-related information to make better business decisions and deliver greater value to customers. It has evolved from its CAD and PDM roots to encompass a broad suite of product-related activities across many industries.

PLM is currently adding the most value to Ping's design, engineering and manufacturing processes, which makes sense given its corporate strategy. "We have to be good at marketing, but our real focus is on quality and performance," Shoenhair says. "We're much more engineering-oriented than some of our competitors."

The level of collaboration PLM allows is hugely helpful when, say, implementing new designs consistently within product platforms. When Ping brought out its new G5 family of products, says Shoenhair, "PLM allowed us to make sure that what was being designed in one segment was visible to others. We wanted all G5 putters to have a similar look and color, and we wanted the irons to look like they were in the same family as the putters." Meanwhile, detailed product information—3D model information, product specifications, manufacturing instructions and the like—is all stored in a data repository and ties back to a particular product. A purchasing agent can then use that information to determine which materials to buy.

Since introducing PLM, Ping has increased the number of new products it introduces annually from 2 to 14, while the average time from inception to delivery of a new product has gone from 24 months to 9. What used to take one engineer 60 days to complete now takes 5 days. And whereas Ping was never a major player in the market for metal-wood drivers, the company recently enjoyed a string of six months during which it sold more of the pricey clubs than any of its competitors, according to Golf Datatech, a market research firm that follows the golf-equipment industry.

Now, says Shoenhair, Ping is working on a strategy to increase collaboration with suppliers. While Ping relies on PLM data internally, it still uses "e-mail or other outdated modes" to communicate with suppliers. He wants to give suppliers a window into such areas as product requirements, so they can be included earlier in the design process. Furthermore, once suppliers begin working on their own designs, Shoenhair would like for Ping to be able to look at those models and work iteratively on design together. "We might change a head design, which would change the shaft diameter we need," he says. PLM, Shoenhair believes, will prove a critical element in helping integrate Ping's suppliers.

How can we better align our product strategy and systems with our corporate performance objectives?

How might access to product information help improve our functional processes and results?

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