Get It To Them FastGet It To Them Fast

It works like this: PGA Tour arms a volunteer squad of walking scorers with PDAs and laser operators with tripod-mounted lasers they aim at a ball when it comes to rest on the course. A walking scorer presses a "shot hit" button the moment a ball is whacked, creating what Evans calls a notification event. The lasers then locate the ball using a grid system that calculates the distance traveled and the distance to the hole. The data is processed by 11 IBM Netfinity servers housed in an on-site semitrailer with a digital-line connection back to PGA Tour's data center in Ponte Verda Beach, Fla. There, publishing software morphs the data into a graphical representation of the golf course that lets online viewers track the progress of any player on any hole.

Evans doesn't consider the setup an extravagance. "If you think of our mission-critical applications, the ability to score a golf tournament and communicate that is one of them." Indeed, PGA Tour's real-time data also is shared with clients such as the Golf Channel.

PGA Tour used creative thinking to put its system into place, but it's not foolproof. For instance, as any golfer with a wicked hook knows, some shots sail out of sight, rendering the ball-tracking system useless until the laser operator is able to visually place it, which may take several minutes.

Sand traps and deep rough are an apt metaphor for the obstacles companies face when trying to build real-time business models. It isn't easy providing faster information access to more people, and the problem starts with people and money limitations and with integration. Almost eight in 10 respondents to information Research's survey cite resource constraints as an obstacle to collecting and managing real-time data, while seven in 10 cite a lack of data integration. Other challenges near the top of the list include difficulty analyzing real-time data, insufficient tools, and the high cost of collecting and monitoring information, each mentioned by just over half of respondents.

More often than not, real-time strategies require tinkering simultaneously with IT infrastructures and business processes. When asked how their companies have moved toward the real-time approach, 43% say both business processes and technology had to be refined. Only 5% say technology tuning alone got the job done.

Joel Lauterbach, director of retailing process development at music and electronics retailer Best Buy Co., will always associate the first taste of having achieved near real-time inventory with country-music singer Faith Hill. Lauterbach's team spent a weekend last June putting in a process, centered on a new merchandising system developed by Retek Inc., to update inventory levels of every product at each of its 546 stores within 30 minutes of purchase. After pulling an all-nighter, Lauterbach drove from Best Buy's Minneapolis headquarters to a nearby store and bought one of Hill's compact discs. By the time he got back, the sale was reflected in the corporate system. "I wanted to be the first one to recognize our real-time capability," he says.

By the holiday season, the retailer had expanded the system so personnel in its Minneapolis stores could view, from point-of-sale terminals, inventory levels in their stores and others nearby. One benefit of that capability is rapid reordering of low-stock goods. When it comes to CD and DVD sales, timing counts. The majority of new DVD sales occur within two weeks of release. "If you've missed the boat up front on that title, you've missed it for the life of the product," Lauterbach says.

In addition to increasing the likelihood Best Buy will have popular products in stock, the system helps it avoid extra freight charges for rush orders and lets it carry lower inventories and activate cell-phone or satellite-dish service within minutes of a purchase. A key value in being able to see inventory at other stores is customer retention. Best Buy doesn't want a customer walking out the door while a clerk calls a nearby store to see if it has, say, a wide-screen plasma TV in stock. "That results in not only a lot of unproductive time for the associate but also for the customer," Lauterbach says. The company is expanding the in-store capability to all its stores this summer. And now that the system has proven it can handle 30-minute updates, Best Buy plans to shorten the cycle to 15 minutes.

Fast and accurate inventory information is just as helpful when buying a prom dress as a CD. When a mother and her daughter recently went shopping at a Macy's department store in Manhasset, N.Y., they found just the right dress -- but not the right size. A salesperson punched the item number into a sales terminal and printed out a list of other Macy's stores in the region that had the dress in stock in the desired size. That solved one problem. "Now," the mom says, "I just have to get used to the idea of my daughter leaving the house in a slinky, backless dress."