While the golf industry recognizes its challenges, such as a decline in the number of golfers (aged 18 to 34) in North America and Europe, the future of the game is looking bright. Today, 25 million Americans play 455 million rounds of golf each year at over 15,000 facilities across the nation, and the golf industry contributes around $70 billion per year to America’s economy, supporting two million jobs (as reported by various industry insiders, such as the National Golf Foundation).

Elsewhere in the world, interest in the sport is steadily growing, with the game being played in over 200 countries. According to the World Golf Report 2015, the top four markets outside America where golf is on the rise are Japan, South Korea, the UK, and Canada. And interest is also emerging in China, Southeast Asia, Central Europe, and South America. With golf’s reintroduction this August to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — for the first time since 1904 — many people across the globe will have their first glimpse of the game, and new interest in the sport will surely be sparked internationally.

This global expansion of golf means that companies in the industry — such as David Leadbetter Golf, a leading authority in golf instruction and golf product design — need to think about expanding their businesses internationally and ensuring they have solid, consistent systems in place to help them innovate into the future.

“Goals in the ‘80s and ‘90s were different,” says Benedict Riches, Managing Director of David Leadbetter Golf. “Now, you need technology, and you need to innovate with the future in mind.”

Improving Its Game

Started in the 1980s by golf coach David Leadbetter himself as a brand that offers a holistic approach to golf instruction for people of all ages and abilities, the business has grown steadily over the years by following a licensing model, with 20 staff members at the company’s headquarters in Davenport, Florida, and another 60 instructors running 25 golf academies in 13 countries. As the business grew, it evolved its model to also sell golf training goods and services online.

To ensure a sustainable global brand that would help David Leadbetter Golf expand into emerging regions, the business wanted to abandon its reliance on spreadsheets and disparate systems, which involved duplicate data entry, and deploy a cloud-based solution that would provide better visibility into inventory and revenue streams, a more stable and scalable system for accounting and customer relationship management, and remote access to applications.

After an extensive evaluation process, the business chose SAP Business One hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud as the solution. With data residing in one central location, data reconciliation would drastically improve, and executives would be able to make more strategic decisions. “We felt that SAP Business One was the most secure and audit-driven system we could implement,” says Riches. “Other software packages do not have the added security that we felt SAP Business One has. Also, the reporting features were excellent for our managers to use.”

For the entire life cycle of the implementation, David Leadbetter Golf partnered with Vision33. This partnership was especially valuable when the business deployed the cycle-counting functionality of SAP Business One, which helped make its inventory record-keeping more precise and detailed. David Leadbetter Golf not only gained new methods and ideas from Vision33 to better manage its operations, it also implemented e-commerce functionality that provided visibility into global market demands and top-selling products for future planning. “Understanding what SAP Business One and its analytics can do and learning what you do in business and applying that to the sport is profound,” Riches says.

All Fairways and Greens

After SAP Business One was deployed, David Leadbetter Golf realized a host of benefits. In addition to greater data transparency into inventory, expenses, and revenue, it has analytics to pinpoint areas for further profitability with a more holistic view of the customer base and top-selling products. With secure, real-time access to company data from anywhere, anytime, the business can better manage finance and operations processes, including budgeting and precision valuation of inventory.

To date, the business has achieved a 15% increase in revenue and a 10% decrease in operational costs, and better inventory management has led to a 17% reduction in inventory to optimize stock. In addition to providing a better understanding of global market demands, the solution’s analytics tools also provide insight into how to better service key business partners, which leads to improved relationships.

By establishing a basis to analyze instructors’ thresholds and billable hours and by gaining full visibility into their time and availability, golf academies now run more efficiently, with instructors performing to their optimum capacity. The business has seen a 12% increase in instructor productivity, and the staff at the company’s headquarters has shown a 21% efficiency improvement rate. With the stability and scalability of SAP Business One, and with the help of partnerships with SAP and Vision33, David Leadbetter Golf is better positioned to be more forward-thinking and innovative about the future goals for the company.