Ken Welchman, director of quality, Golf Ball Operations, Acushnet Company (Titleist), gave a compelling presentation at the IQPC Six Sigma Summit in Orlando, Florida, in January 2008.

It is a fascinating glimpse at what makes Titleist the #1 Ball in Golf.

(You can access it and his presentation slides using the links below.)

Titleist has used GainSeeker Suite for over 15 years. The system was originally deployed only for real-time production data collection, which was driven by the need to understand variation in real-time.

“We were being challenged by upper management to continue improving our products,” says Ken. “To do that, we needed to know where the variation was. Then we could identify projects to eliminate that variation. We needed a data collection system that helped us organize the data so that we could analyze our processes real time.”

More recently, the company has been using GainSeeker in the raw materials area and as the foundation of the Acushnet Supplier Improvement Program. This is the program Ken described in his presentation at the IQPC Sigx Sigma Summit.

“We put all our raw material data into GainSeeker by Hertzler,” Says Ken in his presentation. “It gives us everything we want to know, when we want to know it…. We can get it over any time period we want. We can break it down by any traceability factor we want. It really really helps us out. We can do anything we want with this database.”

mp3_icon_sm Open an audio version of Ken’s presentation (26 MB) in a new window. (This will play only if your computer is configured for mp3s.)
powerpoint_icon_sm Open Ken’s PowerPoint slide presentation (416 KB) in a new window
pdf_icon_sm Open a PDF version of Ken’s presentation slides (100 KB) in a new window