TaylorMade Drives Home Operational Gains with Angles for Oracle

TaylorMade switched to Oracle EBS to boost its data capabilities and discovered that:

• Angles gave users a consistent data experience through the integration
• Change management was minimal and users experienced quick time to value
• Angles allowed TaylorMade to capitalize on custom golf club boom during the pandemic
• Sales could see supply chain threats and manage customer expectations, boosting loyalty
• Angles analytics aligns data for optimized data warehouse reporting

Headquartered in Carlsbad, California, TaylorMade Golf Company is a leading manufacturer of high-performance golf equipment, golf balls and accessories. Founded in 1979, TaylorMade has a history of innovative industry-leading products. A major supplier for professionals and hobbyists alike, TaylorMade has established a legacy of breaking from tradition to reach new thresholds of performance and its technological advancements touch all sectors of the sport.

The Challenge: Pairing a New ERP With a Reporting Tool That Meets Future Demands

One of the first tasks for David Damitz, BI Architect at TaylorMade, was to migrate its systems from a weathered ERP to Oracle EBS. The challenges he saw with crossing over to EBS from the native ERP were:

1. Familiarizing users with new data-gathering methods emerging from interactions with customers.
2. Effectively adding that new data to a data warehouse so that its benefits could be maximized.
3. Aligning ever-changing data to provide more real-time results and analytics to stakeholders.

“As these new products or programs or projects get launched, we need to understand how to support the analytics piece of it, and how to be able to provide feedback and KPIs to the business on how these new products are selling, or how these new programs are running,” said Damitz. “So, part of the challenge for my team is to figure out, ‘Okay, is this generating data in new ways? How do we pull this data into our data warehouse? How are we able to provide more real time results to our business?’”

Introducing Angles for Oracle to the TaylorMade Team

When his search for a new reporting tool began, Damitz kept in mind that TaylorMade had its own BI tools that were ingrained and accepted within the organization. He didn’t want to have to roll out a new BI tool on top of a new ERP. His goal was to minimize the change management challenges, while balancing overall cost with the right product fit for the users he was servicing. Angles for Oracle hit the sweet spot, satisfying all of his criteria.

Damitz saw that Angles would enable his team to:

• Save time and money establishing a data warehouse or data lake in the cloud with minimal data preparation.
• Provide real-time, self-service access to application data without IT assistance and time-consuming data preparation.
• Quickly modify or extend business views to fit their needs without typical delays.

“We had already had some experience with the Noetix product (Angles was previously known as Noetix),” said Damitz. “That was something we were familiar with, but I took the opportunity to look at other products and I noticed that, while other tools and products were available and had some interesting and compelling features, a lot of them were a little bit more proprietary. As far as the BI tool is concerned, that was one thing about the Noetix product that really appealed to us. As I did that analysis, it became clear that Views was something that would help us implement quickly and be able to provide reporting to the business right away. Otherwise, we’d have to create custom reports and learn all of the tables and all the new modules that we weren’t as familiar with.”

Implementing Angles Saved Valuable Time With Frustration-Free Processes

Going live with Oracle EBS was a big change for TaylorMade. Every department was impacted and users had to learn a new system with new processes. Angles was seamlessly rolled out around that same time, thanks to its ERP agnostic nature. Angles paired well with the new ERP and existing or native tools. Angles helped to reduce the learning curve for his users, allowing them to access data from multiple sources via one familiar interface. This meant everyone hit the ground running providing a swift time-to-value for these major technology integrations.

“Implementing the new version of Angles allowed us to quickly generate reporting metrics that would give our business access to this data, right from day one, and really reduce the risk of them not having the data they need to run their business as we went live with this new system,” said Damitz.

Championship-Level Results With Angles

Acing the Outcome with Angles for Oracle

The key wins for the organization with Angles have primarily been the speed and ease of the transition, as well as a comfortable price point. The affordability of Angles was a major plus for Damitz, allowing him to bypass the costs of a larger, more expensive reporting solution. There was no excessive change management processes or training to endure. In fact, the implementation was seamless for TaylorMade’s users since they were able to use existing BI tools to help make the transition easier.

“We’ve gone through a number of different business cycles over the years, a number of ups and downs in the economy, and ups and downs in our industry. Analytics becomes so important, as you’re navigating those ebbs and flows, and Angles allows us to do different things to look at data in different ways to try to analyze how we reacted to things in the past that worked, and how we reacted that maybe didn’t work as well, which helps us to avoid those pitfalls in the future. So, just to be able to have our users be able to come to us and ask for specific data that they haven’t asked for before.”

Using Real Time Data to Bypass Supply Chain Delays

While the pandemic wreaked havoc on some markets and supply chains, TaylorMade custom golf clubs benefitted the lockdowns. In fact, Damitz says, the golfing industry itself pivoted from players clamoring for stock clubs at sporting goods stores to eyeing and buying fitted clubs from custom manufacturers. TaylorMade was, so to speak, tailor made for this trend.

“Customers were getting fit for clubs that fit them specifically,” said Damitz. “How it works is they go to fitting events where a fitter will tell them what’s the best club for them, and what’s the best shaft and what’s the best grip. Then they can order that club, either through the fitter or online through our e-commerce platform. And they can get exactly what the fitter told them would be best for them.”

But it wasn’t a process without challenges. Sometimes a customer requested a specific club with a component that would be help up by supply chain delays. Facing lengthy lead times while working with these customers, Damitz’s team was able to use Angles to provide real-time information about stock levels of various components. This meant their fitters and sales reps could see which orders were at risk of delays and determine what components were driving those long lead times.

“They can see that there’s a particular shaft that is backordered, and if the customer wants a particular shaft that has certain performance characteristics, it’s possible that there are other shafts that give them almost exactly the same performance characteristics. So, if we swapped out that shaft with the other one, the lead time went from a couple of months to a couple of weeks, or maybe even a couple of days if we could get it right away. By providing that data to the custom team, they were able to go through their backlog of orders and really move a lot of those orders up and get those clubs into the hands of the customers a lot sooner, and obviously that’s going to make for a lot happier customers.”

Seeing the Enhanced Value With Real-Time Data and Analytics

A familiar user of Angles and its predecessor over the years, Damitz has seen the data landscape and analytics evolve. Business users want more real-time data, and they want it faster than ever. From purchasing receipts to accounting and GL transactions, getting real-time data in a hurry is a must. To this end, having the analytics component that Angles delivers is also a huge win for his team.

“They do things like credit checks and holds where they need to analyze data on a more real-time basis. But when we’re talking about how our products are selling, and how our customers are doing, and how we’re doing on collections and things like that, those usually don’t have much of a real-time need. That’s where we use the analytics side of Angles, when we’re able to do multiple loads throughout the day and pull that data out of EBS into our data warehouse. And that allows us to use a data warehouse that’s been optimized for reporting purposes. That has given us really good performance, real consistency throughout the years.”

For Damitz, the top benefits of Angles are the:

• Speed and flexibility of data access for his team and stakeholders
• Analytics that provide real-time insight into operations and enable true agility
• Improvements to the purchase and inventory management process, keeping costs down and customers happy

“All those things help us be successful, and they help our customers be successful,” said Damitz. “That is key to just have that data available in a way so that it is easy to understand, easy to get to, so that our users don’t have to spend a lot of their time and effort generating analytics. They can use their time and effort doing the analysis on how these new kinds of unprecedented situations that are happening throughout the world, will impact us as an organization.”

A Brighter Future Is Inevitable With Angles

By removing manual data processes and boosting confidence in analysis, Angles has saved Damitz’s team hours of repetitive work. His team can spend this time on other projects that provide value across the organization. Moving forwards, his team will look to take advantage of deeper Angles for Oracle features that will extend their operational analysis. It portends an even brighter data future for TaylorMade and its customers.

“As we look to the future of our use of data, and in particular the use of Angles, we’ve implemented a new cloud-based data warehouse that we are just starting to understand and see the benefits of,” said Damitz. “We want to start to leverage that more and more in the analytics space. If another organization was considering Angles among other solutions for their reporting needs, particularly from Oracle EBS, I would definitely encourage them to look into the product.”

Learn more or even schedule a demo here, and see how Angles for Oracle can help transform your business today.