Golf Ranch Case Study

Golf Ranch

Modernizing a leading golf company’s approach to customer data and business intelligence

Owl Technology Solutions empowered Golf Ranch with a cutting-edge, cloud-native data platform, replacing manual data processes with a scalable ingestion pipeline and real-time analytics.

The Big Picture

Golf Ranch, the leading operator of standalone technology-enabled golf ranges, partnered with Owl Technology Solutions (OTS) to fully overhaul their data collection, persistence, and analytics strategies. We reimagined their approach to customer data, empowering Golf Ranch to leverage their data’s full potential for business intelligence (BI) and customer relationship management (CRM) usage. Golf Ranch shifted from manual collection to a cloud-based data warehouse solution, employing powerful data transformations to unify their disparate data streams. By surfacing the data in an intuitive BI tool with real-time updates, business leaders and data analysts across the company are now able to better access and understand their data using these insights to craft data-driven, actionable plans for customer outreach.

The new system has not only eliminated time-consuming manual tasks but has also unlocked capabilities we hadn’t envisioned. From creating actionable reports to answering complex questions in record time, the solution has become an indispensable tool for our team’s success.

George

Golf Ranch Business Intelligence

The Problem

Golf Ranch faced several challenges common to organizations trying to scale their data analysis processes alongside their business. They were looking at dozens of data streams originating from customer and POS systems, multiplied by each of their locations (with imminent plans to expand to more). Each data stream had unique export methods, file formats, and data shapes. Data collection was manual and time-consuming. To get a big-picture view of all the systems, several steps had to be taken to transform and join each of the Excel fields into an aggregated sheet.

This made it difficult to drill down into data across the organization, resulting in lost business intelligence opportunities, barriers to real-time customer outreach, and potential limitations on future growth. Golf Ranch’s goal was to become a data-first organization, which necessitated establishing a data infrastructure to address these issues and serve as a foundation for future business plans, such as expanding to customer-facing mobile apps and automated marketing.

The Solution

OTS sought to create an end-to-end solution that would solve the problems at hand and scale efficiently to meet the company’s future needs. The team worked with Golf Ranch to understand how customer and purchasing data could help them better serve their customers. This included an onsite visit to understand the user journeys firsthand, as well as market analysis to understand how Golf Ranch’s approach to data compared to the industry standard.

From these conversations, the key outcomes for the data platform became clear:

Automated data ingestion across all the data streams
Centralized data warehouse with structured data that could easily be queried
Robust data model that unifies all source data into a format that best serves business needs
Sufficiently low latency to support real-time data analytics
Compatible with Golf Ranch’s existing CRM solution
Friendly User Interface (UI) for customer and purchase data analysis and dashboarding
Extensible to future needs such as customer-facing applications or AI-analysis

To begin the development phase, the OTS team collaborated closely with source data providers to identify the root causes of data inconsistencies and analyze system limitations. Once the team understood the underlying problems, they were able to design a robust, automated ingestion process that centralized all data into a data warehouse powered by Snowflake. Finally, OTS leveraged DBT to perform complex data transformations across all data sources, unifying all data into a standardized model optimized for business intelligence queries.

The new system culminated in real-time, customizable dashboards in Tableau that visualized Golf Ranch KPIs and in-depth analytics on customer and purchasing behavior across their company. Having centralized, structured data opened the door to slicing and dicing across historical data, specific subsets of systems and locations, or any desired arbitrary dimension. Reports that were previously manually assembled, requiring time-consuming visits to each individual data source and resolving inconsistencies by hand, were now viewable at the click of a button. Our team delivered training and supporting guides for the new platform, ensuring Golf Ranch was fully empowered to leverage it for all of their BI needs.

OTS additionally configured the new automated data streams to directly feed into Golf Ranch’s CRM tooling. This enabled Golf Ranch to make data-driven adjustments to their marketing and customer outreach approach to further improve sales and customer management processes.

The Impact

By adopting a modern data platform, Golf Ranch has streamlined operations, gained deeper customer insights, and enhanced connectivity across its value chain. As Golf Ranch continues their rapid expansion as a national brand, the data platform that OTS forged will scale to meet the data demands of these new locations and allow Golf Ranch immediate insight into their data. Comparing user data between locations and across all of their sources, once a highly time-consuming and convoluted process, is now as simple as opening a single dashboard. By embracing a modern approach to their data, Golf Ranch is moving even more rapidly towards their goal of reshaping the future of the golf industry.

The collaboration with OTS has been transformative for Golf Ranch. OTS's ability to understand our needs, communicate complex ideas clearly, and manage the project efficiently ensured a smooth and successful implementation. Their constant communication, deep expertise, and hands-on support made it an engaging and educational experience.