Microsoft Business Solutions
Customer Solution Case Study
Owner of Golf Courses Stays Above Par with
Comprehensive Management Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Entertainment
Customer Profile
San Diego, California-based Heritage Golf
Group owns and operates 16 premier golf
course properties, which are run by 1,500
employees throughout the United States.
Business Situation
As it began to acquire golf courses, the
organization wanted to implement a
centralized system that would help it
handle everything from tee-time scheduling
to accounts payable.
Solution
Heritage Golf Group chose Microsoft®
Business Solutions–Great Plains® software
and integrated it with a MICROS Systems
point-of-sale system for a comprehensive
technology solution.
Benefits
 Three-week to three-day close for
monthly financials
 Long-term scalability for trouble-free
growth
 Better decision making through fast
access to accurate data
“For a $100 million dollar company like Heritage Golf
Group, using Microsoft Great Plains represents an
annual savings of $1.5 to $2 million in additional
overhead.”
Scott Little, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Heritage Golf Group
As the owner and operator of 16 premier golf course facilities
across the United States, Heritage Golf Group needed a centralized,
efficient means of managing its financial and inventory information.
Seeking a complete, flexible solution, Heritage Golf Group worked
with partner OpenCourse Solutions to deploy a comprehensive
system based on Microsoft® Business Solutions–Great Plains®
software integrated with a MICROS Systems point-of-sale solution.
The resulting gains in efficiency meant that the company could cut
its accounting department workload in half while tripling the
number of golf courses it acquired. Heritage Golf Group now has
faster access to accurate information and produces a weekly
management scorecard so that course managers can easily check
the financial status of their properties.
“Microsoft Business
Solutions–Great Plains
is as cost-effective for 6
courses as it is for 18,
and it will easily scale to
meet our needs as we
continue to grow.”
Scott Little, Executive Vice President and Chief
Financial Officer, Heritage Golf Group
Situation
Based in San Diego, California, Heritage Golf
Group owns and operates 16 first-class
private, resort, and daily-fee golf course
facilities throughout the United States, from
Florida to Washington State. The company,
which now has 1,500 employees, was formed
in 2001 by a small group of executives with
experience in the golf course management
industry. The group set out to identify premier
courses and acquire them, bringing them
under the Heritage Golf Group umbrella.
When the acquisition process first began, the
central office of Heritage Golf Group used a
Lawson Financials accounting system that
was operated in a hosted environment. “The
Lawson Financials software, as a hosted
solution, was expensive to own and
maintain,” says Scott Little, Executive Vice
President and Chief Financial Officer for
Heritage Golf Group. “We knew we could find
a solution that could give us a better return
on investment.”
Although the Lawson Financials system did
an adequate job of delivering the financial
information that Heritage Golf Group needed,
it didn’t provide support for any of the other
areas involved in golf course management,
such as tee-time scheduling, inventorying,
and merchandising. And the system’s limited
view of detailed information led to a lack of
business intelligence for the company.
Within its first year, Heritage Golf Group
acquired six golf courses and decided to
standardize the IT environment across all of
them. The courses had established golfspecific systems that were typical for the
industry and were particular to each course,
and they often included stand-alone
components such as inventory systems. “The
systems we found in place at the golf courses
we acquired were generally older technology
from a niche market that were difficult to
manage centrally,” says Little.
Members of the accounting department at
each course would port all their monthly
financial information into various
spreadsheets that they would send to the
Heritage Golf Group central office. The central
accounting department then had to manually
move all the information into the central
system. With the manual process, a
significant amount of time was spent retyping
the information. And because retyping often
led to data entry errors, Heritage Golf Group
lacked confidence in the validity of its
financial statements.
Also, it was time-consuming to produce the
statements. The company closed its monthly
books an average of three weeks after every
month’s end, so course managers never had
insight into real-time financial status.
“Because we were most of the way through
the next month before we even received
numbers, we had no way of knowing where
each course stood in terms of meeting its
profit goals,” says Little.
As a company with ambitious growth goals,
Heritage Golf Group determined that it had to
find a new solution that could meet both the
specific needs of a single golf course and the
needs of a $100 million corporation. Heritage
Golf Group decided that a more centralized,
comprehensive solution could be far more
efficient than one consisting of multiple,
course-specific systems. Says Little, “The allin-one systems that golf courses were using
to address their needs were rudimentary and
lacked control, especially on the inventory
side of the business.”
Solution
Heritage Golf Group considered a number of
alternatives and eventually narrowed the field
to a small-business offering from J.D.
Edwards and the Microsoft® Business
Solutions–Great Plains® software.
In September 2001, after a three-month
analysis of the two potential systems,
Heritage Golf Group decided to run its
courses on the Microsoft Business Solutions–
Great Plains Professional solution. “We
needed something powerful and scalable,”
says Little. “Microsoft Business Solutions–
Great Plains is as cost-effective for 6 courses
as it is for 18, and it will easily scale to meet
our needs as we continue to grow.”
It also was important that the accounts
receivable functionality for each individual
course be integrated into the multicourse
system. “We definitely recognized the
importance of choosing a solution that could
integrate well with Microsoft technology,”
says Little. “We wanted to be able to take
advantage of Microsoft support, its rich set of
integration tools across product lines, and the
company’s overall stability. We knew that
incorporating a Microsoft Business Solutions
system would not put us in the position of
relying on technology that may become
orphaned.”
Heritage Golf Group worked with personnel
from partner OpenCourse Solutions to
perform both a current-state analysis and a
business needs analysis. OpenCourse
Solutions worked with the company to
establish a detailed chart of accounts and to
determine all other business process
specifics.
One of the biggest decisions for Heritage Golf
Group during the solution’s design phase was
determining what inventory system to use.
The company could choose from a range of
third-party independent inventory systems or
use the inventory module in the Microsoft
Great Plains system. After consideration,
Heritage Golf Group opted to implement the
Microsoft Great Plains inventory module to
provide centralized inventory for all the
company’s properties by smoothly integrating
each course’s inventory information into the
centralized system. “We reviewed a number
of third-party inventory systems and ruled
them out quickly because not one of them
could provide the same features and
integration for such a reasonable cost,” says
Little. “Plus, the Microsoft Great Plains
inventory module didn’t require us to use a
particular point-of-sale system, as did the
third-party options.”
Heritage Golf Group began the Microsoft
Great Plains implementation in October
2001, and the solution was established
within 90 days. Heritage Golf Group did not
conduct any off-site classroom training, but
the company did set up on-site module
training for the central accounting and office
personnel. The company also provided Webbased training for the accountants at its
individual golf courses. Today, Heritage Golf
Group has 30 Microsoft Great Plains licenses
and approximately 50 users.
The company follows a role-based scenario in
terms of its Microsoft Great Plains use. Each
golf course has two types of users: the course
accountant uses the Microsoft Great Plains
system to handle accounts receivable and
accounts payable, and the course
merchandiser uses it for purchasing and
inventory activities. The only piece of the
Heritage Golf Group environment that is not
part of Microsoft Great Plains software is the
MICROS Systems point-of-sale system, but it
fully interoperates with Microsoft Great Plains
for a comprehensive solution.
The solution transfers all the data from the
individual golf courses into a centralized
database based on Microsoft SQL Server™
2000, part of Microsoft Windows Server
System™ integrated server software. The SQL
Server database serves as a single common
data source from which the information is
both integrated into Microsoft Great Plains
and sent to a data warehouse. Heritage Golf
Group uses Microsoft Business Solutions for
“We reduced the size of
our central accounting
department by 50
percent and tripled the
size of the company, so
we know that Microsoft
Great Plains is delivering
efficiencies.”
Scott Little, Executive Vice President and Chief
Financial Officer, Heritage Golf Group
Analytics–FRx® Professional each week to
create an updated scorecard so that
managers can quickly and easily review
complete, detailed financial information.
“Microsoft FRx gives us lots of flexibility in
putting together all our financial statements
to reflect a corporate entity,” says Little.
The OpenCourse Solutions tee-time
reservations system used at multiple Heritage
Golf Group locations was built using the
Microsoft .NET Framework, which is an
integral component of the Microsoft
Windows® operating system. The .NET
Framework connects people, information,
systems, and devices so that Heritage Golf
Group can access and use important
information whenever and wherever it is
needed. All customer-facing services, such as
the call center, Web services, and scheduling,
are linked in real time for reliable customer
service.
In addition to the general accounting
modules, Heritage Golf Group also makes use
of the sales order processing module in
Microsoft Great Plains. All revenue
transactions, from private club memberships
to customer loyalty rewards, are run through
the sales order processing module.
Benefits
Using Microsoft Business Solutions–Great
Plains software provided Heritage Golf Group
with the functionality to address its
immediate issues and the long-term
scalability it needs to continue acquiring
properties. The solution has helped the
company’s accounting employees be more
efficient in their work processes, which will
lead to considerable cost savings.
Increased Accounting Efficiency for
Reduced Costs
Microsoft Great Plains has made such a
difference in efficiency for Heritage Golf
Group that the company’s accounting staff at
the home office actually has decreased in
size even though the company has tripled the
number of courses it owns. The central office
used to have seven accountants using the
Lawson Financials software to service six golf
courses; now there are only three
accountants in the central office servicing 18
courses. The accounting staff members’
tasks include general ledger, cash functions,
and bank reconciliations. “We reduced the
size of our central accounting department by
more than 50 percent and tripled the size of
the company, so we know that Microsoft
Great Plains is delivering efficiencies,” says
Little.
In addition to employee time savings, those
efficiencies have translated to cost savings.
“If Heritage Golf Group had stayed with our
old system instead of implementing the
Microsoft Great Plains integrated solution,
our operations costs would be considerably
more right now, just from the perspective of
the additional accounting personnel that
would have been necessary,” says Little.
“Plus, every time we acquire a new golf
course, we’re able to reduce that individual
course’s accounting costs by 50 percent
because our solution is so much more
efficient. Our accounting costs with the
Microsoft Great Plains solution are .5 percent
of our gross revenue. Typically, those costs
are 2 to 3 percent of gross revenue for a
retail company of our size. For a $100 million
dollar company like Heritage Golf Group,
using Microsoft Great Plains represents an
annual savings of $1.5 to $2 million in
additional overhead.”
By using one centralized inventory system
that already is integrated into its Microsoft
Great Plains accounts payable system,
Heritage Golf Group can avoid the risk of data
reentry error and save time that was spent
cobbling together multiple data sources and
systems from the different courses. At a
detailed level, all the information from a
“Since implementing
Microsoft Great Plains,
we’ve gone from three
weeks to three days for
our business close each
month because
everything is
integrated.”
Scott Little, Executive Vice President and Chief
Financial Officer, Heritage Golf Group
single day’s transactions automatically is fed
from the individual courses to the SQL Server
database and integrated into the Microsoft
Great Plains system by the following day.
Long-Term Scalability
Heritage Golf Group found it easy to launch
the Microsoft Great Plains solution, and the
company is finding it even easier to add new
golf courses to the system. “We appreciated
the initial straightforward migration path that
made it easy to start out with a small number
of users, but now we’re adding even more
data, courses, and users without having to
add a lot of resources or layers of
management,” says Little. “I never thought
we’d go from 6 seats to 30 in less than 4
years!
“Coming into the project, our vision was to
build a system that would not require
additional accountants or IT staff members to
support our anticipated growth, and we’ve
been amazed at how well the Microsoft Great
Plains solution has helped us achieve our
vision.”
Better Decision Making
Heritage Golf Group has come a long way
since the days of closing out each month
three weeks after its end. “Since
implementing Microsoft Great Plains, we’ve
gone from three weeks to three days for our
business close each month because
everything is integrated,” says Little. “Not only
are we able to produce our reports more
quickly, but because the information flows to
a central system directly from the SQL Server
2000 database, the information we have to
work with is more accurate, which improves
our insight into the business and helps us
make better, more strategic decisions.”
All Heritage Golf Group transactions are
integrated into the Microsoft Great Plains
system at a detailed level. The central
accounting department can choose the
degree of detail involved with its tasks, from
creating summary reports to tracing a single
transaction. “Now we can easily find minute
details, such as an individual customer check
number, which would have been a huge
challenge with our previous system,” says
Little.
One of the most beneficial new features for
Heritage Golf Group is the management
scorecard produced by the Microsoft Great
Plains–based system and used by golf course
managers to check the financial status of
their individual courses. Microsoft Great
Plains accounts payable data is automatically
incorporated into the scorecard, making it
easy to monitor spending and expenses on a
weekly basis to ensure compliance with the
spending limits set for each course.
“Managing expenses is important for any
distributed organization,” says Little. “Having
all our data housed in the SQL Server 2000
database and incorporated into the scorecard
gives us an individual golf course-level
snapshot that’s quick and easy to get and
straightforward to understand. Monitoring our
status with the weekly scorecards gives us
the ability both to hit monthly budgets better
and to find crucial information whenever we
need it.”
Flexibility Due to Full Integration
Part of the original selection criteria for the
financial system was the ability to gain from
independent software vendors and their
existing add-on solutions. The company has a
fairly complicated cash management and
disbursement process, and using Microsoft
Great Plains has helped it preserve some of
the strategic solutions that address the
process.
Says Little, “It’s our philosophy to try not to
customize our Microsoft Great Plains solution
beyond some report changes. Rather than
having to do customizations ourselves, we
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
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Canada. Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about OpenCourse
Solutions products and services, call (866)
817-4853, or visit the Web site at:
www.opencourse.com
Microsoft Business Solutions
wanted to take advantage of all the available
Microsoft and third-party products that
smoothly integrate with our systems.” In fact,
Heritage Golf Group plans to add Microsoft
CRM and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal
Server 2003 to its environment.
Microsoft Business Solutions offer integrated
business applications and services that allow
small and midsize organizations and divisions
of large enterprises to connect employees,
customers, and suppliers for improved
efficiency. The financial management,
customer relationship management, supply
chain management, and analytics
applications work with other Microsoft
software, including the Microsoft Office
System and the Windows operating system,
to streamline processes across an entire
organization. This gives businesses insight to
respond rapidly, plan strategically, and
execute quickly. Microsoft Business Solutions
are delivered through a worldwide network of
channel partners that provide specialized
services and local support tailored to a
company’s needs.
The Microsoft Great Plains–based solution
provides an integrated golf course
management solution and represents a
significant improvement over other systems
for the golf industry because it automates all
aspects of daily operations. “We built a
Microsoft-centric solution set that integrates
public and private golf management systems
with Microsoft Great Plains,” says Ron Ward,
Chief Operating Officer for OpenCourse
Solutions. “And everyone who’s seen it
recognizes the value—especially for the
owners of multiple golf courses—of a solution
that’s integrated like this.”
For more information about Heritage Golf
Group products and services, call (858)
720-0694, or visit the Web site at:
www.heritagegolf.com
For more information about Microsoft
Business Solutions, go to:
www.microsoft.com/businesssolutions
Software and Services

Microsoft Windows Server System
− Microsoft SQL Server 2000
 Microsoft Business Solutions
− Microsoft Great Plains
− Microsoft FRx Professional
Partners

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case
study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO
WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Microsoft, FRx, Great Plains, SharePoint, Windows, and
Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or
trademarks of Microsoft Corporation or FRx Software
Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. FRx
Software Corporation is a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation.
All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
Document published July 2005
Technologies
− Microsoft .NET Framework
− OpenCourse Solutions