Company | Rawlings
Background
Rawlings, part of Jarden Team Sports, is the leading manufacturer and marketer of baseball equipment and other sporting goods in the United States. As the Official Baseball and Helmet of Major League Baseball® and the official ball of the NCAA® Baseball Championships, Rawlings sought a project management solution that would allow them to accelerate new product introduction and early market penetration. “Most college baseball teams start hitting the batting cages in the fall,” says Ben McIntosh, Commercialization Manager at Rawlings. “If we can get next season’s bats in the hands of college players in the fall, they’ll be using our bats the following spring. We chose AtTask as our project management solution, because we believe they will help us do that.”
Business Challenge
The challenges associated with new product research and development made it difficult for Rawlings to make projections on new product introduction and delivery. To accelerate the new product development and manufacturing of baseball bats, Rawlings needed a project and portfolio management (PPM) solution that would address three specific objectives:
- Fostering collaboration among their global development team was critical to the new product development process
- A centralized location for all their development data to enable Rawlings to more efficiently manage the information needed to meet project milestones
- The ability to accurately forecast projected completion dates, based on current project data, to identify lagging projects early and keep teams on schedule
@task Provides a Global Solution to Rawlings
To support Rawlings’ objective to provide transparency, reduce costs, and drive new product introduction, @task enables them to:
Deploy Globally—Rawlings leverages @task’s solution to facilitate team collaboration anywhere in the world—including Rawlings’ team members in the U.S., Central America, and China where bats are manufactured. Because @task works on any platform and browser, automatically accounts for different time zones, and is the only PPM solution available in English, Spanish, and Chinese; Rawlings’ global development teams can collaborate and work together in real time.
Increase Visibility and Accountability—Centralizing project data enables Rawlings to increase visibility and accountability on every project—from concept to delivery. All the information needed for project teams to meet milestones and stay on track is at their fingertips in @task—empowering Rawlings project teams to deliver on time.
Accelerate Market Penetration—@task automatically creates project projections based upon real-time data. This enables Rawlings to accurately forecast projected completion dates, keeping projects on track, making project teams more efficient, and expediting the development process—shortening the time it takes for Rawlings to go to market with new products and to grow marketshare.
Results
@task allows Rawlings project teams to successfully collaborate from anywhere in the world—regardless of whether they are in the U.S., South America, or China. With all of Rawlings development data in a centralized location—Rawlings can accurately forecast projected completion dates, keeping projects on track, making teams more efficient, expediting the development process and shortening the time it takes to get to market.
@task gives Rawlings visibility into every initiative enabling them to search for any product known to be in development and identify where it is in the process, what the anticipated delivery date is, and whether or not it can be expected to meet the scheduled delivery date. “Our product is 100% seasonal,” says McIntosh, “if we miss our deadline, our opportunity for that year is lost. @task allows us to know exactly where any product in development is at any point in time—helping us keep projects on track so we can hit our scheduled delivery date.”
“We considered 12-13 other project management solutions,” says McIntosh. “@task was the most intuitive and made the most sense to us. Compared to the other solutions we considered, I was confident that @task would do what we needed it to do from the minute I watched the online demo—I haven’t been disappointed.”
