Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Owner of Golf Courses Stays Above Par with Comprehensive Management Solution
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Entertainment
Customer Profile
San Diego, California-based Heritage Golf Group owns and operates 16 premier golf course properties, which are run by 1,500 employees throughout the United States.
Business Situation
As it began to acquire golf courses, the organization wanted to implement a centralized system that would help it handle everything from tee-time scheduling to accounts payable.
Solution
Heritage Golf Group chose Microsoft® Business Solutions–Great Plains® software and integrated it with aMICROS Systems point-of-sale system for a comprehensive technology solution.
Benefits
Three-week to three-day close for monthly financials
Long-term scalability for trouble-free growth
Better decision making through fast access to accurate data / “For a $100 million dollar company like Heritage Golf Group, using Microsoft GreatPlains represents an annual savings of $1.5 to $2 millionin additional overhead.”
Scott Little, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Heritage Golf Group
As the owner and operator of 16 premier golf course facilities across the United States, Heritage Golf Group needed a centralized, efficient means of managing its financial and inventory information. Seeking a complete, flexible solution, Heritage Golf Group worked with partner OpenCourse Solutions to deploy a comprehensive system based on Microsoft® Business Solutions–Great Plains® softwareintegrated with a MICROS Systems point-of-sale solution. The resulting gains in efficiency meant that the company could cut its accounting department workload in half while tripling thenumber of golf courses it acquired. Heritage Golf Group now has faster access to accurate information and produces a weekly management scorecard so that course managers can easily check the financial status of their properties.
Situation
Based in San Diego, California, Heritage Golf Group owns and operates 16 first-class private, resort, and daily-fee golf course facilities throughout the United States, from Florida toWashingtonState. The company, which now has 1,500 employees, was formed in 2001 by a small group of executives with experience in the golf course management industry. The group set out to identify premier courses and acquire them, bringing them under the Heritage Golf Group umbrella.
When the acquisition process first began, the central office of Heritage Golf Group used a Lawson Financials accounting system that was operated in a hosted environment. “The Lawson Financials software, as a hosted solution, was expensive to own and maintain,”says Scott Little, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Heritage Golf Group. “We knew we could find a solution that could give us a better return on investment.”
Although the Lawson Financials system did an adequate job of delivering the financial information that Heritage Golf Group needed, it didn’t provide support for any of the other areas involved in golf course management, such as tee-time scheduling, inventorying, and merchandising. And the system’s limited view of detailed information led to a lack of business intelligence for the company.
Within its first year, Heritage Golf Group acquired six golf courses and decided to standardize the IT environment across all of them. The courses had established golf-specific systems that were typical for the industry andwere particular to each course, and they often included stand-alone components such as inventory systems. “The systems we found in place at the golf courses we acquired were generally older technology from a niche market that were difficult to manage centrally,” says Little.
Members of the accounting department at each course would port all their monthly financial information into various spreadsheets that they would send to the Heritage Golf Group central office. The central accounting department then had to manually move all the information into the central system.With the manual process,a significant amount of time was spent retypingthe information. And because retyping often led to data entry errors, Heritage Golf Group lacked confidence in the validity of its financial statements.
Also, it was time-consuming to produce the statements.The company closed its monthly books an average of three weeks after every month’s end, so course managers never had insight into real-time financial status. “Because we were most of the way through the next month before we even received numbers, we had no way of knowing where each course stood in terms of meeting its profit goals,” says Little.
As a company with ambitious growth goals, Heritage Golf Group determined that it had to find a new solution that could meetboth the specific needs of a single golf course andthe needsof a $100 million corporation.Heritage Golf Groupdecided that amorecentralized, comprehensivesolution could be far more efficient than one consisting of multiple, course-specific systems. Says Little, “The all-in-one systems that golf courses were using to address their needs were rudimentary and lacked control, especially on the inventory side of the business.”
Solution
Heritage Golf Group considered a number of alternatives and eventually narrowed the field to a small-business offering from J.D. Edwards and theMicrosoft® Business Solutions–Great Plains®software.
In September 2001, after a three-month analysis of the two potential systems, Heritage Golf Group decided to run its courses on the Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains Professional solution. “We needed something powerful and scalable,” says Little. “Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains is as cost-effective for 6 courses as it is for 18, and it will easily scale to meet our needs as we continue to grow.”
It also was important that the accounts receivable functionality for each individual course be integrated into the multicourse system. “We definitely recognized the importanceof choosing a solution that could integrate well with Microsoft technology,” says Little. “We wanted to be able to take advantage of Microsoft support, its rich set of integration tools across product lines, and the company’s overall stability.We knew that incorporating a Microsoft Business Solutions system would not put us in the position of relying on technology that may become orphaned.”
Heritage Golf Group worked with personnelfrom partner OpenCourse Solutionsto perform both a current-state analysis and a business needs analysis. OpenCourse Solutions worked with the company to establish a detailed chart of accounts and to determine all other business process specifics.
One of the biggest decisions for Heritage Golf Group during the solution’s design phase was determining what inventory system to use. The company could choose from a range of third-party independent inventory systems or use the inventory module in the Microsoft Great Plains system. After consideration, Heritage Golf Groupopted to implement the Microsoft Great Plains inventory module to provide centralized inventory for all the company’sproperties by smoothly integrating each course’s inventory information into the centralized system. “We reviewed a number of third-party inventory systems and ruled them out quickly because not one of them could provide the same features and integration for such a reasonable cost,” says Little. “Plus, the Microsoft Great Plains inventory module didn’t require us to use a particular point-of-sale system, as did the third-party options.”
Heritage Golf Group began the Microsoft Great Plains implementation in October 2001, and the solution was established within 90 days. Heritage Golf Group didnot conduct any off-site classroom training, but the company did set up on-site module training for the central accounting and office personnel. The company also provided Web-based training for the accountants at its individual golf courses. Today, Heritage Golf Group has 30 Microsoft Great Plains licenses and approximately 50 users.
The company follows a role-based scenario in terms of its Microsoft Great Plains use. Each golf course has two types of users: the course accountant uses the Microsoft Great Plains system to handle accounts receivable and accounts payable, and the course merchandiser uses it for purchasing and inventory activities. The only piece of the Heritage Golf Group environment that is not part of Microsoft Great Plains software is the MICROS Systems point-of-sale system, but it fully interoperates with Microsoft Great Plains for a comprehensive solution.
The solution transfers all the data from the individual golf courses into a centralized database based on Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, part of Microsoft Windows Server System™integrated server software. The SQL Server database serves as a single common data source from which the information is both integrated into Microsoft Great Plains and sent to a data warehouse. Heritage Golf Group uses Microsoft Business Solutions for Analytics–FRx® Professionaleach week to create an updated scorecard so that managers can quickly and easily review complete, detailed financial information. “Microsoft FRx gives us lots of flexibility in putting together all our financial statements to reflect a corporate entity,” says Little.
The OpenCourse Solutions tee-time reservations system used at multiple Heritage Golf Group locations was built using the Microsoft .NET Framework, which is an integral component of the Microsoft Windows® operating system. The .NET Framework connects people, information, systems, and devices so that Heritage Golf Group can access and use important information whenever and wherever it is needed. All customer-facing services, such as the call center, Web services, and scheduling, are linked in real time for reliable customer service.
In addition to the general accounting modules, Heritage Golf Group also makes use of the sales order processing module in Microsoft Great Plains. All revenue transactions, from private club memberships to customer loyalty rewards, are run through the sales order processing module.
Benefits
Using Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains software provided Heritage Golf Group with the functionality to address its immediate issues and the long-term scalability it needs to continue acquiring properties. The solution has helpedthe company’s accounting employees be more efficient in their work processes, which will lead to considerable cost savings.
Increased Accounting Efficiency for Reduced Costs
Microsoft Great Plains has made such a difference in efficiency for Heritage Golf Group that the company’s accounting staff at the home office actually has decreased in size even though the company has tripled the number of courses it owns. The central office used to haveseven accountants using the Lawson Financials software to servicesix golf courses; now there are only threeaccountants in the central office servicing 18 courses. The accounting staff members’ tasks include general ledger, cash functions, and bank reconciliations. “We reduced the size of our central accounting department by more than 50 percent and tripled the size of the company, so we know that Microsoft Great Plains is delivering efficiencies,” says Little.
In addition to employee time savings, those efficiencies have translated to cost savings. “If Heritage Golf Group had stayed with our old system instead ofimplementing the Microsoft Great Plains integrated solution, our operations costs would be considerably more right now, just from the perspective of the additional accounting personnelthat would have been necessary,” says Little. “Plus, every time we acquire a new golf course, we’re able to reduce that individual course’s accounting costs by 50 percent because our solution is so much more efficient. Our accounting costs with the Microsoft Great Plains solution are .5 percent of our gross revenue. Typically, those costs are2 to 3percent of gross revenue for a retail company of our size. For a $100 million dollar company like Heritage Golf Group, using Microsoft Great Plains represents an annual savings of $1.5 to $2 million in additional overhead.”
By using one centralized inventory system that already is integrated into its Microsoft Great Plains accounts payable system, Heritage Golf Group canavoid the risk of data reentry error and save time that was spentcobbling together multiple data sources and systems from the different courses. At a detailed level, all the information from a single day’s transactions automatically is fed from the individual coursesto the SQL Server database and integrated into the Microsoft Great Plains system by the following day.
Long-Term Scalability
Heritage Golf Group found it easy to launchthe Microsoft Great Plains solution, and the company is finding it even easier to add new golf courses to the system. “We appreciated the initial straightforward migration path that made it easy to start out with a small number of users, but now we’re adding even more data, courses, and users without having to add a lot of resources or layers of management,” says Little. “I never thought we’d go from 6 seats to 30 in less than 4years!
“Coming into the project, our vision was to build a system that would not require additional accountants or IT staff members to support our anticipated growth, and we’ve been amazed at how well the Microsoft Great Plains solution has helped us achieve our vision.”
Better Decision Making
Heritage Golf Group has come a long way since the days of closing out each month three weeks after its end. “Since implementing Microsoft Great Plains, we’ve gone from three weeks to three days for our business close each month because everything is integrated,” says Little. “Not only are we able to produce our reports more quickly, but because the information flows to a central system directly from the SQL Server 2000 database, the information we have to work with is more accurate, which improves our insight into the business and helps us make better, morestrategic decisions.”
All Heritage Golf Group transactions are integrated into the Microsoft Great Plains system at a detailed level. The central accounting department can choose the degree of detail involved with its tasks, from creating summary reports to tracing a single transaction. “Now we can easily find minute details, such as an individual customer check number, which would have been a huge challenge with our previous system,” says Little.
One of the most beneficial new features for Heritage Golf Group is the management scorecard produced by the Microsoft Great Plains–based system and used by golf course managers to check the financial status of their individual courses. Microsoft Great Plains accounts payable data is automatically incorporated into the scorecard, making it easy to monitor spending and expenses on a weekly basis to ensure compliance with the spending limits set for each course.
“Managing expenses is important for any distributed organization,” says Little. “Having all our data housed in the SQL Server 2000 database and incorporated into the scorecard gives us an individual golf course-level snapshot that’s quick and easy to get and straightforward to understand. Monitoring our status with the weekly scorecards gives us the ability bothto hit monthly budgets better and to find crucial information whenever we need it.”
Flexibility Due to Full Integration
Part of the original selection criteria for the financial system was the ability to gain fromindependent software vendors and their existing add-on solutions. The company has a fairly complicated cash management and disbursement process, and using Microsoft Great Plains has helped it preserve some of the strategic solutions that address the process.
Says Little, “It’s our philosophy to try not to customize our Microsoft Great Plains solution beyond some report changes. Rather than having to do customizations ourselves, we wanted to take advantage of all the available Microsoft and third-party products that smoothly integrate with our systems.” In fact, Heritage Golf Group plans to add Microsoft CRM and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003to its environment.
The Microsoft Great Plains–based solution provides an integrated golf course management solution and represents a significant improvement over other systems for the golf industry because it automates all aspects of daily operations. “We built a Microsoft-centric solution set that integrates public and private golf management systems with Microsoft Great Plains,” says Ron Ward, Chief Operating Officerfor OpenCourse Solutions. “And everyone who’s seen itrecognizes the value—especially for the owners of multiple golf courses—of a solution that’s integrated like this.”
Microsoft Business Solutions