Ping swings into better action with digital product development environment

The company has been using PDS for development and production of its drivers, hybrids, putters, wedges and bags. Beyond speeding up time to market, it also attributes quality and performance improvements to its new engineering development environment, and says it has quintupled new product introductions. Ping has been a PTC user since 2001, and the company’s engineers began using Windchill ProjectLink and Pro/Engineer 3D CAD/CAM/CAE software to model four new golf wedges in 2002 – a decision that then reduced modelling time from 60 days to five. The company says that early work helped it to improve design quality since it its engineers were better able to control the shape of its wedges and calculate exact weight before moving on to production. That minimised the need for prototypes, saving an average six weeks of production and retooling time – and hence the speed of development and launch. Then in 2003 Ping installed Windchill PDMLink, PTC’s content and process management software, to enable data sharing and collaboration in the engineering department, along with better version control and improved change management. Manufacturing custom-fitted golf clubs with millions of possible variations, getting multiple product lines to market in time for peak selling seasons, and operating in a market growing at only 1—2% per year were then among the challenges. “We are in a constant battle for market share,” says John Solheim, vice president engineering at Ping. “Product life cycles in our industry are very short and the pressure to continuously innovate is high. “We chose PTC because its software enables us to expand our product development capacity, simultaneously explore multiple new designs, and refine our engineering strategies to improve efficiency with existing resources. We are also interested in exploring PTC’s new Arbortext dynamic publishing solutions and are currently evaluating strategies to further decrease time to market for new products by optimising our associated publishing processes.”