Customer
TaylorMade Golf
Summary
Founded in 1979 with the pledge to combine innovation with authenticity, TaylorMade has a decades-long reputation as the best-performing golf brand in the world.
Since the creation of the first metalwood in 1979, the organization has established itself as more than just a cutting-edge sports gear manufacturer. With the motto, “never done” at its core, TaylorMade has a culture where innovation and improvement are not just encouraged but nurtured. This drive for excellence spans their departments – from process to products and athletes, pushing their people to take risks, explore new frontiers, and find new pathways for improvement.
Challenge
Constantly striving to work smarter and drive efficiency across the business, the TaylorMade IT team has invested heavily in exploring and adopting the latest technology solutions. To hold their tradition as the best performing golf brand, these new solutions need to be secure and compliant, globally accessible, and best-in class. To put it simply – the solutions they use, must exemplify the qualities the brand holds dearest.
“We’re looking for a solution that performs better than what anyone else does and has the best team behind it” says Ali Chitsaz, Senior Manager, Digital Workplace, TaylorMade Golf
One area that the team recognized needed improvement was content management – particularly around patent and trademark information.
To be able to manage the plethora of legal documents and sensitive information, traditionally the TaylorMade legal team would spend endless hours manually managing the content as it arrived in their Outlook inboxes. When they received trademark or patent information in their inbox, members of the legal team would move the individual document to their hierarchical file system in Outlook folders.
“We had these lawyers literally spending hours and hours of time filing and moving documents.” – Ali Chitsaz, Senior Manager, Digital Workplace, TaylorMade Golf
This tedious process was inefficient and prone to human error, pushing the organization away from their mission around innovation.
Strategy
Throughout the years, TaylorMade has been an early adopter of Microsoft Solutions – including Microsoft Teams, and other collaboration tools. With their trust set firmly in Microsoft solutions, TaylorMade’s IT team looked to Microsoft for a new approach to content management.
They were quickly pointed to Microsoft Syntex as a solution.
To get started with Syntex, TaylorMade connected with Microsoft Partner, Lighthouse Global. With their expertise in compliance, security and information governance, Lighthouse Global served as the ideal consultants for the job.
Microsoft Syntex content processing leverages AI to recognize repeated fields within documents to properly ingest and tag information – helping teams ensure it’s properly stored, governed, and searchable for the right team members.
“This increases the learning, decreases the amount of manual labor, decreases the complexity, and increases the throughput in terms of the ability to look at documents, manage them, and keep them within the risk tolerances that our clients expect”. Paul Moye, Executive Director, Strategic Partnerships, Lighthouse Global
After TaylorMade provided them over 200 patent and trademark documents, Lighthouse global analyzed the content to understand which fields were important to ingest. They then trained the Syntex models to recognize the given fields and apply the proper metadata. With this metadata applied, TaylorMade can properly classify the information and keep it more secure.
"The more time we can save with our legal team not having to file documents and not having to search for documents and actually be able to be an attorney is of huge value."
Ali Chitsaz (Senior Manager, Digital Workplace, TaylorMade Golf)
Results
With Microsoft Syntex, TaylorMade can ensure that their lawyers have more time to deal with legal matters while also ensuring that the legal documents are both protected and accessible to the right team members.
TaylorMade’s journey with Lighthouse and Syntex doesn’t stop there. As new Syntex features become available, the organization’s dream of improving their processes continues to grow. From translating documents in Mandarin and Japanese, to creating new ways of searching for and annotating information, the teams at TaylorMade are eager to scale AI across their processes.
Ali Chitsaz explains, “to be able to go through and take a screenshot of a slide when you’re watching a video and then being able to search that six months later is going to prove so immensely valuable for the community because there’s so much lost that is not searchable.”
The excitement is shared by Lighthouse, “Syntex is a really great tool for our clients. Especially with new capabilities coming out that will help them with data classification, process automation, and applying information protection controls” says Chelsey Vance, Senior Advisory Consultant, Lighthouse Global.
Combining their determination to explore new approaches, with the expertise of Lighthouse, and continual advancements to Content AI with Microsoft Syntex – the future for TaylorMade is bright.
“TaylorMade is powered by innovation and we love that Microsoft is innovating with us here”. Ali Chitsaz, Senior Manager, Digital Workplace, TaylorMade Golf
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