Article by Harvey Silverman, Golf Business Live

We launched “Tech Talks” this past February, a new webcast to bring members a variety of interviews with technology leaders from around the world. In fact, we’ve set the record for the longest-distance NGCOA interview, all the way from Cape Town, South Africa, outdistancing Seoul, South Korea. So, yes, we’re “spanning the globe.” More importantly, we’re spanning a variety of new and innovative technologies for green grass golf course operators.

We had our longest-distance interview with Bodo Sieber, CEO of Tagmarshal. Bodo connected from Cape Town, South Africa (Tagmarshal has a U.S. office in Atlanta), a tidy 7,858 miles from NGCOA HQ in Charleston, SC, and just edging out Seoul, South Korea. Tagmarshal is an NGCOA Smart Buy partner and brings a data-driven GPS tracking system to a worldwide portfolio of courses, including notable ones like Bandon Dunes, Erin Hills and Whistling Straits. Tagmarshal began as a “tag” technology, a device that could be attached to a golf bag or carried in a golfer’s pocket or cart. Its purpose was to track the flow and pace of play and give course operators real-time data to improve it.

Next came the ubiquitous on-cart screens displaying GPS distances, hole layouts, and more. But Tagmarshal doesn’t want to be known as just another GPS company. Its DNA is in the data it provides and analyzes. Bodo explained to us the three metrics to consider when measuring pace and flow. The key is “average time vs. goal time.” “Average is a bad indicator,” Bodo exclaims. “It hides the outliers, both good and bad, so we work with courses to establish goal times and then measure how many rounds are faster, on pace or slower.”

In Bodo’s example, the average on a particular day might be six minutes over goal time. But drilling down in the data, it might show 20% of the rounds played considerably faster, 40% were on pace, and 40% went over the goal time. So the average round time might be acceptable, except that 40% were materially delayed with wait times – a primary source of golfer discontent. Management now has the data to enhance the flow by time of day, depending on the play volume.

Read the full article here.

By Steve Eubanks, Golf Business Magazine

The problem is as old as the game, and so are the debates on how to fix it. Ask any operator or any golfer to list their top-five gripes and “slow play” will fall somewhere near the top. For the player, it’s a maddening mixture of frustration and resignation, the kind of thing that drives many out of the game or at least away from more rounds than they might otherwise play. But for the operator, it’s a financial disaster. Footfalls on the first tee are the revenue engine of every club – public, private, resort or hybrid. Slow play limits rounds and reduces revenue. Full stop. Anything that can remedy that ailment is welcome news.

Enter Tagmarshal, a digital tracking product that does a good deal more than tell an operator where his slow groups are located. According to Bodo Sieber, the CEO of Tagmarshal, “The idea for the system came, as you might expect, during a very slow round of golf. My two partners played and were backed up with three groups waiting on the 14th hole. As often happens, they were saying, ‘Where is the marshal?’ When they got back, they came to me and said, ‘You’re a tech geek. Is there not something we can do to solve this?’” In the past, the answer has been, no. In a private club setting, the staff knows who the slow players are. There are rarely any mysteries among members. On the resort and public front, a marshal can only do so much. The guy shooting 140 paid the same fees as the single-digit handicap behind him. And when the tee sheet is full, letting a group or two play through doesn’t do much to solve the problem.

Clubs have tried building “time pars” into their GPS systems so messages flash when you’re behind. Unfortunately, golfers either ignore those messages or find them infuriating. The most hostile interactions on any given day occur when the marshal rolls up and says, “You guys are out of position and need to pick it up.” “The standard GPS system that you have on your typical golf cart is of great frontend value to the golfer,” Sieber said. “You can see how far you are from the flagstick, get a video flyover of the hole or at least a graphic overview, and maybe order some food for the turn. But there aren’t really back-end business applications there.

“Of course, the commercial engine at a course is high-quality rounds. Maximizing quality and quantity adds value. Given a course’s high fixed-cost base, any additional capacity you create is bottom-line profit. It’s like adding three more rows of seats to an airliner and selling them. The fixed costs remain the same.”

With that in mind, Sieber, the tech geek, created a device-and-software interface that tracks every player on the course and also provides impressive backend data to the management team. For cart riders, the device looks like your standard GPS. For walkers, it looks like a small cell phone that’s clipped to the golf bag or given to a caddie. “With the data we can generate, we add so much more value than the initial vision of making golf faster. We really have built a powerful business engine that looks at everything from round-time-per-hole to tee-box-wait-times as well as breakdowns of flow over particular times of day or particular days of the week. This allows the course to optimize everything from staffing to pin placements to ensure that the flow of play is consistent, and the quality of the experience is really high.

“With this technology, many courses simply do away with marshals altogether because that relationship is always adversarial. Instead, one of the assistants or other shop personnel goes out as a ‘play ambassador’ or some other name, armed with the data. They know exactly where to go because they know exactly where the holdup is. And they arrive armed with data on how long a group has taken to play each shot on each hole. That person then helps the group catch up by being with them and subtly showing them ways to move. Not once has the staffer needed to say, ‘You’re slow.’ It’s just showing them data and helping them move along.”

A decade ago, players might have balked at having the creepy eye of Big Brother attached to their golf bag. But with GPS tracking in cell phones, cars, computers and appliances, and AirTags being attached to everything from keys to pet collars, people have become accustomed to a tracking world. “At first, we were finding that people asked what it was all about, especially if they’ve been given a device to put on their golf bags,” Sieber said. “But once it’s explained that this is to eliminate slow play, they all said, ‘Thank goodness.’ There is no resistance after that.”

As of this writing, the Tagmarshal system is on 500 courses in 14 countries, with some impressive clients on the list. Baltusrol and Erin Hills were early adopters. Whistling Straits, Kiawah, Bandon Dunes, Oakmont, Pinehurst, even the DP World Tour and the R&A use the system for certain data points. And while the system was not originally built as an agronomic tool, the value to superintendents and general managers is astronomical. “We have built a system that displays a heat map of where people go and where hey don’t go, so you can track that over time,” Sieber said. “So, a superintendent can look at that map and use it for three purposes: First, to save on routine maintenance. You know with data whether or not you have to irrigate and fertilize certain areas. Just changing a sprinkler head from 360 degrees to 180 degrees saves half the water, for example.

The second area is determining how much or what parts of the course can be turned back to natural areas. We have several cases where a course looked at the patterns and a golf course architect said, ‘We now have an opportunity to extend our cost savings way beyond what we originally thought was possible.’” That’s what Baltusrol did during its renovation. As Gil Hanse looked at the Lower Course, the club provided him with the heat-map data, which made it much easier for Hanse to return certain areas to nature. “There is also a function of traffic control,” Sieber said. “Obviously, there are areas where you are not supposed to go, especially with a cart. The superintendent can tell where to put signage or put fencing or how to change the course.

“That is so vital because course planners can now look at the data and say, ‘If we just took out this one bush or this one tree or converted this one area back to clay or natural grasses, we could speed up play on this hole by six minutes.’ Conversely, sometimes you might want to make a hole more difficult and a little slower to open up a bottleneck that naturally occurs ahead. We can show the impact that these incremental changes make over long periods of time.

“Pinehurst has looked at another variable: green speeds. Obviously, if your speeds are tour grade, the weekend golfer is going to struggle, and pace-of-play will deteriorate. Operators have to find a balance. Guests want a major-championshipcaliber experience, but they also want to play in a reasonable time. Pinehurst has used the system to determine at what green speed play is optimized. “It’s actually about 25% slower than what the USGA recommends as a standard green speed, because of the course design and the number of rounds that they play.” A superintendent can also track his equipment to know exactly how long it takes to mow or maintain each area. And he can interface with the golf shop to see if there are any gaps in play so the crew can slip out and get some work done.

The art of business intelligence is to make data actionable and easy to digest,” Sieber said. “We realize that the majority of our market is not Baltusrol or Pinehurst. It’s Average Joe golf courses with $2.5 to $3 million in revenue. Those operators don’t have time to dig into the data like a major championship venue, so we have a level of the system that is appropriate for them. “But the nice thing about our system is that it becomes essential. Just as we have all become dependent on Map apps on our phones, our system can be understood at a glance by an 8-year-old. You don’t have to know all the calculations to get a great deal of usage out of it.

“Our clients look at our system 30 to 40 times a day because it becomes intuitive. Obviously, there are business analytics that can be used, but that is not for everyone. But everyone can use certain aspects of the system to incrementally improve the operations and track outcomes.”

Article by Guy Cipriano, Golf Course Industry

Unknowingly, many golf maintenance pros are already using data to support decisions.

“What we have to realize is what data is: It’s written-down observations,” says Dr. Bill Kreuser, the president and co-founder of GreenKeeper, a service offering science-based information, products and recommendations to turfgrass managers. “Superintendents are some of the most observant people and they keep track of what they are seeing. Turning it into data is the next step of writing it down or logging it somewhere so that you don’t live in the moment, and you can look for long-term trends.”

Bodo Sieber, the CEO of Tagmarshal, a system designed to help golf facilities navigate on-course traffic, compares a golf course to the human body. Data ensures operations are conducted at peak efficiency.

“If you go for a health check and you know what your critical body KPIs are, you can make better decisions, and adjust your lifestyle,” Sieber says. “If you’re trying to run a marathon, trying to get fit, and if you don’t engage the science behind what your body needs, then you’re going to try, but you’re going to fail. It’s the same with a golf operation.”

Sieber adds that data comes in two forms: what’s happening in real-time and what has happened over time. Soil and air temperatures, golf cart and maintenance vehicle movement, and soil moisture levels are examples of real-time data being accumulated on golf courses. Clipping yields, Growing Degree Days, and spray and fertility records are examples of historic data.

Data and analytics have become so prevalent in professional sports that nearly every major franchise devotes full-time personnel to interpreting them.

Could a need for similar personnel and departments reach golf facilities? Full-time data analysts are unlikely — and unnecessary — in golf course management, according to Tagmarshal CEO Bodo Sieber. “That would be complete overkill,” he says.

Instead of hiring a data analyst, Sieber recommends facilities identifying and developing a “champion” for prodding their property in a data-driven direction. Once that person is selected, they should receive opportunities to research how various platforms can help the course achieve its goals.

“You don’t need to be a data scientist,” Sieber says. “You need to play people to their strengths. If somebody is a little bit more technical and likes digging into data and systems, then make them the champion and empower them. Make it their mission. They can add a lot of value by teaching, training others, and answering their questions.”

GreenKeeper president and co-founder Dr. Bill Kreuser also doesn’t view a data manager position as a necessity for a golf facility because automation offered by emerging platforms will simplify numerical-based decisions.

“The old-school method might have been you hire a data analyst, and they dig and pull up databases and try to make connections,” Kreuser says. “With how fast things are moving on the tech side, we will be able to get a lot of value through automation. These services are cheaper. Computer scientists make them, and we can apply them to all sorts of industries and sectors. We’re just brining it to the golf sector.”

In addition to conducting research and working with turf managers, Kreuser assists in the maintenance and management of Jim Ager Memorial Golf Course, a 9-hole, par-3 layout and learning center in Lincoln, Nebraska. Measuring clippings and tracking growth rates supports fertility decisions on Ager’s greens, while data provided via a sensor resulted in a steep fertility reduction on fairways, according to Kreuser.

“Having that consistent product is important and we have overall doubled the amount of rounds at the par-3 at Lincoln Ager, because people know when they go there they can expect consistent, firm, fast putting greens and they can work on their short game,” Kreuser says. “Having consistency in the end product is important for the course.”

Using data collected via a traffic management platform can lead to a direct ROI. Studying historic and live traffic patterns can help operators adjust tee time and better position maintenance employees around play. Data on how long it takes golfers to play holes can be incorporated into course setup decisions to boost pace of play.

“Even if we can shave two minutes off these two holes, three minutes off that hole, one minute on this hole and two minutes at the halfway house, we have shaved off 10 minutes,” Sieber says. “That means one additional tee time that we never had. One more tee time means four times $80 the club never had.”

Sieber’s company recently worked with a course in Colorado to determine why one hole took nearly five minutes longer to complete than its projected time. The data they collected determined a medium-sized bush impeded play. The bush was removed. “It was a very low-cost exercise, and they never would have known that, because there are a lot of those bushes on the course,” Sieber says. “None were an issue besides this one.”

Sieber adds that effective data integration using automated programs will clear time for the most important and often most enjoyable part of a golf job: cultivating relationships.

“Very often at a golf facility the staff needs to make things work while their hair is on fire, because they are short-staffed and there’s always more to do,” Sieber says. “The less time I have to run around and try to make things work at my golf course, collect data points and use reams of paper to write down things so that I can stay ahead of things, the more time I have to build relationships and add to the experiences of the players I’m serving.”

Sieber admits that golf lags behind many other industries in collecting data besides basic financial information. He sees positives in the slow start.

“The good news is that it’s obviously easier to jump onto something that another industry has pioneered,” Sieber says. “They have done the hard part. If it took another industry 10 or 15 years to get to a certain point, you can hopefully get there in eight years or shorter.”

Dozens of effective apps and platforms have entered the golf maintenance market over the past decade. And dozens more are coming.

“The adoption curve will accelerate over the next three years and technology will continue to get better and improve,” Dorer says. “There was a day when the handheld soil monitoring devices weren’t on a golf course. Now pretty much everybody has one.

“What’s the next step? What do you do with that data? Right now, it’s helping maybe in daily operations, but I think where it’s going to help is in more planning and providing higher levels of predictability.”

Predicting exactly where, when and how superintendents will incorporate and utilize data might be as tricky as winning a March Madness office pool. Superintendents are a fundamentally imaginative group.

“The creativity and inventiveness in how to apply some of these tools by superintendents is really amazing and we’re actually counting on that,” Dorer says. “We know that we can’t think of all the different ways they can use data.”