Golf equipment maker tightens grip on shipments with Oracle Cloud

Srixon/Cleveland Golf, based in Huntington Beach, California, is a manufacturer of top-quality golf clubs, balls, and accessories, sold by leading sports retailers and golf pro shops in 26 countries. The company is part of SRI Sports Ltd., whose holdings also include the XXIO and Dunlop brands. Srixon/Cleveland currently has endorsement deals with dozens of top golf pros, including Keegan Bradley, Graeme McDowell, J.B. Holmes, and Jerry Kelly.

About 20% of Srixon/Cleveland’s business is custom products. The company found it difficult to give customers accurate, reliable delivery dates, since that required pulling together large amounts of item and component data. “That cannot be done in spreadsheets. We tried,” says Charles Chamberlain, director of IT. “There are just too many factors involved.”

The company used to try to figure out when a product would be available based upon purchase order data. But that process still didn’t give its customer-facing people sufficient information, because they didn’t know which components the planning department already had allocated to other products. “It was an ordeal,” Chamberlain says.

After a call from an Oracle salesperson, Chamberlain and the sales rep started to talk about what Srixon/Cleveland could do to improve on-time deliveries. Chamberlain liked what he heard and got buy-in from the company’s vice president of operations to evaluate Oracle Cloud Order Management, part of the Oracle Cloud SCM suite of supply chain management applications.

“It was definitely reassuring knowing that the label on the brand was Oracle,” he says. “We’re already an Oracle customer—we’ve been involved with Oracle for more than 20 years. Having the name Oracle behind the product gave us confidence that we were going with a product that we knew we could put our trust in.”

Within two-and-a-half months of its go-live with Oracle Cloud Order Management, Srixon/Cleveland saw an 81.5% increase in on-time shipments compared with the year before, with minimal disruption to the company’s processes and lower IT costs.

“We had to learn the modules, but the core business did not suffer because we added functionality,” Chamberlain says. “As the IT director, that was great because it removed from my team the tasks around change management, training, and fielding questions and/or complaints.”

Because about 20% of its golf club business is custom orders—for example, one customer might need a wedge that’s bent 2 degrees flatter than the standard model, while another will want one 2 degrees more upright—the company has a very wide spectrum of product offerings, and each one has its own unique bill of materials. In the past, every time reps needed to look up a bill of material, they’d have to manually go into the work order and then into the parts list. Now all of that sorting is done automatically, freeing up employees to do other things, like providing top-notch customer experiences.

Srixon/Cleveland had some cloud computing experience, as its ERP application is hosted in a private cloud, but Oracle Cloud Order Management was its first major public cloud service. “Ultimately, we won’t have to bring in other employees to fulfill complicated tasks that we are not even experts in,” Chamberlain says. “For us, it was an easy step into the cloud.”

AVATA forged a new path with Srixon/Cleveland Golf using Global Order Promising Cloud tied to both JD Edwards and Oracle’s Supply Planning.  AVATA’s eLync Cloud Integration Platform was used to reduce cost and complexity for a seamless integration.