Callaway innovates with PLM

8 November 2007

Callaway Golf adopted a solution from Siemens PLM Software in order to smooth its collaboration and data accessing processes, and ensure product innovation.

Callaway Golf is well known as a leading global supplier of golf equipment. The company thrives because of its constant product innovation. Such innovation relies on tight coordination between different teams in different locations.

As the company grew in the 1990s one of the biggest challenges it faced was finding an effective way to exchange business critical information, especially large files created with computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing software. A plethora of communication methods were used including e-mail, file transfer protocol and even shipping CDs when very large CAD files were involved.

“The process was kind of a mess,” says John Loo, senior manager of design systems at Callaway. “Because of the transit times communications would get out of sync. Sometimes, during the time it took for a CD to arrive at the manufacturing site, our engineers would make a slight change. The manufacturers would not be aware of the change that had been made, and we would have to start the whole process over again so that everyone was working from the same document.”

To address this fundamental problem Callaway decided to implement a solution based on Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and SharePoint Team Services. Callaway deployed Teamcenter Community Collaboration (TCC), a product life-cycle management solution from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Siemens PLM Software (formerly UGS).

TCC uses Sharepoint products and technologies to provide a Web-based environment that helps the diverse Callaway teams in a number of ways. Information residing on the Callaway portal is accessible 24 hours a day, eliminating the barriers created in the past by time zones and physical boundaries. “Along with being able to access the necessary information and content exactly when they need it, the suppliers have established alerts so that if anything is changed in file, the portal generates an email to notify them of the change,” says Loo. “This helps to eliminate confusion that can lead to delays in development.” TCC also allows Internet-based, real time collaboration on complex CAD files and specification documents. This reduces cycle times and gets products from concept to market more quickly.

Perhaps most crucially for Callaway, the collaboration portal encourages innovation through the enablement of the advanced design team, who are responsible for generating new club concepts and working with new combinations of materials.

“The spark behind innovation comes from engineers and conceptual designers working together,” Loo says. “With the collaborative functions now available, team members can work together more efficiently on design problems and refine concepts faster.”

This article first appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of Prime magazine