PING, Inc. is a family-owned company and a recognized leader in the golf equipment industry. Founded in 1959, PING is dedicated to engineering the highest-performing golf equipment in the world. The company is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States, and has production facilities and offices in Gainsborough, England; Tokyo, Japan; and Ontario, Canada.
PING’s goal is to produce more than 10,000 golf clubs a day in the U.S. alone. Each golf club begins with a work order tag – a barcode label containing all the specifications employees need to build each club. The barcode steers the entire golf club building workflow, which means it is critical for production. PING prints thousands of these labels round-the-clock in its production facilities in the US, UK, Canada, and Japan. To accommodate the increase in demand brought on by the COVID 19-pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, PING expanded production hours to include longer days and weekends. The company needed a labeling system that could provide global support 24/7 for its expanding production.
Before selecting Loftware Cloud, PING’s print server went down in North America. The company that typically serviced their print server had a help desk in France that was open on weekdays from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm local time. Without local IT support they couldn’t get the help they needed to print tags, so they had to stop production. When PING began its search for a new labeling system, the most important requirement was local IT support. PING needed a service provider who could offer 24/7 support in all their production locations. Loftware Cloud’s services team was able to work with PING during the entire new labeling system implementation process and provide them with the support they needed to ensure continuous production.
When PING purchased their previous print server, they were just opening their new offices in the UK and Japan and were only using about half of the available production capacity in their US office. So, they purchased a server that could support a maximum of 100 printers. In the decade that followed, PING’s production expanded considerably, and they needed a labeling system that could support more printers. With Loftware Cloud, PING can use up to 150 printers now, which supports their current production needs and even gives them more room to grow.
PING’s previous labeling system only supported one particular brand of printer. Trying to make other printers work with this legacy system required considerable programming time and resources. While this wasn’t an issue in the US where the printer brand was widely available and inexpensive, it did pose a problem in the UK and Japan locations where the printer brand was less widespread and far more expensive. With Loftware Cloud’s industry-leading family of print drivers, today PING can print to any device, including color printers, and coding and marking devices. Now, when the company needs to source RFID printers, employees can choose the printer that is best suited for their needs.
Our hardware manager came to me and said production requested two more RFID printers. I handed him the list of the drivers available on Loftware Cloud and said, ‘Go, pick what you want.’ Part of our vision was to get the pieces in place so that when we change what’s providing the data, we know whichever system we choose can communicate with Loftware Cloud.
Jeff Baranczyk
Senior Product Owner
