Double-play project: Rawlings to hit batting cages early using AtTask PPM solutions

Rawlings, a name synonymous with baseball since 1877, has chosen AtTask project and portfolio management (PPM) solutions to establish transparency, reduce costs, and drive new product introduction.

By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff February 12, 2009

Rawlings, a name synonymous with baseball since 1877, has chosen AtTask project and portfolio management (PPM) solutions to establish transparency, reduce costs, and drive new product introduction.

“Most college baseball teams start hitting the batting cages in the fall,” says Ben McIntosh, commercialization manager for 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.”

According to AtTask CEO Scott Johnson, “Rawlings turned to us because our solution has an immediate impact on cutting costs and ramping up productivity. Managers and executives can see what’s happening on the front line with real-time, reliable data and actually forecast when projects will be completed—making it possible for companies like Rawlings to develop new products and take them to market quicker.”

Rawlings looked to AtTask to accelerate the new product development and implementation cycle. To accomplish this required a project management solution that delivered upon three specific objectives:

1. Foster collaboration across a global development team to streamline the new product development process;

2. Establish a centralized location for all development data to more efficiently manage the information needed to meet project milestones; and

3. Accurately forecast projected completion dates, based on current project data, making it possible for Rawlings to identify lagging projects early and keep teams on schedule

AtTask’s multilingual and platform-independent solution allows Rawlings project teams to collaborate from anywhere in the world. With all of Rawlings development data in a centralized location, Rawlings can accurately forecast projected completion dates to keep projects on track, make project teams more efficient, and expedite the development process to shorten time-to-market.

“We considered 13 other project management solutions,” says McIntosh. “AtTask was the most intuitive and made the most sense to us. Compared to the other solutions, I was confident that AtTask would do what we needed it to do from the minute I watched the online demo.… I haven’t been disappointed.”