PING, the Phoenix-based golf equipment maker founded by engineer Karsten Solheim in 1959, has long built its reputation on innovation. Its latest modernisation effort has been less about club design than about the machinery behind the business: bringing demand and supply planning into one coherent system.
For years, the company’s planners worked across separate tools, spreadsheets and home-grown processes that did not always speak to one another. That made it difficult to con...
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nect a top-line forecast with the downstream decisions that determine what to buy, when to build and how much component inventory to hold. Scott Niemann, senior production and material planner at PING, said the business needed a single environment that could show how demand forecasts moved through different scenarios and into procurement.
The gap was not a shortage of information but a shortage of alignment. Demand teams could not easily see how their assumptions affected supply decisions, while supply planners and buyers lacked a clear view of the forecast logic sitting upstream. In a manufacturing operation with many product variations and component combinations, that disconnect made planning slower and less transparent.
PING eventually chose John Galt Solutions and its Atlas planning platform after reviewing a number of options. According to the company, the software’s appeal lay in its flexibility and its ability to present different views to different users without requiring custom development. Matt Hoffman, vice-president of product and industry solutions at John Galt, said the platform could be shaped around PING’s planning model rather than forcing the company into a rigid template.
That mattered because PING wanted more than a standard demand-planning tool. It needed to break a model-level forecast down into assembly planning at its Phoenix manufacturing site, then translate that into component-level requirements and materials planning. John Galt said Atlas was able to support that structure while handling the company’s configure-to-order environment.
The implementation was staged rather than abrupt. PING first focused on identifying what data was available and where it lived, then spent time cleansing and structuring it so that the planning engine could use it effectively. Only after that did the company move through model-level forecasting, material requirements planning and, later, the more intricate task of managing component mix.
That phased approach helped PING maintain day-to-day operations while it overhauled planning. It also allowed for repeated feedback between the two teams, with roles and permissions adjusted so that buyers, demand planners and other users could work in ways that suited their responsibilities. According to John Galt, the back-and-forth was central to making the process usable in practice.
The result is a more connected planning cycle. Forecasting, assembly planning, component mix and material requirements now sit inside one system, giving planners a clearer line of sight from demand assumptions to purchase decisions. Demand planners are also more involved in supply discussions, attending meetings and helping to review level-loaded production plans and monthly buy recommendations.
Niemann said that collaborative loop has already changed how the business works. Rather than demand and supply being reconciled only after the fact, the two sides now shape the plan together before decisions are finalised.
The platform also proved useful during a recent ERP go-live, helping to steady planning while the wider systems landscape changed. PING is now looking further ahead, with John Galt saying the next stage could include more advanced statistical modelling, scenario planning and AI-led improvements for launch forecasting and capacity decisions.
For a company whose history is tied to a garage invention that helped reshape golf equipment, the lesson is familiar: innovation is not only about the product on the course, but also about the systems that keep the business moving behind it.
Source: Noah Wire Services
