When golfers hear the words "slow play," their blood pressure spikes and images of dithering idiots leap to mind: the Tour-pro wannabe who takes six full practice swings every time, the 25-handicapper who waits for the green to clear on a par-five, 240 yards away, before dribbling his shot 50 yards.
But according to Bill Yates, a former industry efficiency expert whose main business now is consulting with golf courses about speeding up the game, player behavior ranks only second on his list of slow play's five major causes. No. 1: course-management practices and policies. "Players can be blamed for a lot, yes, but if courses are sending out too many players too fast, nobody has a chance," he said.
In fact, he said, until you clear up the predictable bottlenecks that plague many courses, it is hard to identify the real slow pokes. "Players have been bombarded for decades with information and tips about speeding up play, but if that were the only problem, the industry wouldn't be in the predicament it is today," Yates said.
I encountered Yates at the U.S. Women's Open two weeks ago at Sebonack Golf Club in Southampton, N.Y. He was lurking inconspicuously on the back of the 12th tee, jotting down figures on a clipboard with the help of a clock and three stopwatches. For every threesome that passed through, he noted its time of arrival; that time's difference from the predicted time it should have arrived; the time it had to wait to tee off, if any; and the time the last player putted out.
Yates was doing this work as part of a major new research project by the U.S. Golf Association, whose multiyear goal is to solve golf's serious slow-play problem. "Five-hour-plus rounds of golf are incompatible with life in modern society," said USGA President Glen Nager in announcing the initiative last February.
Yates did similar data harvesting at the men's U.S. Open at Merion earlier in June. "Championship play is a different animal than recreational play," Yates said. As a general rule, he said, expert players in tournaments, deliberately challenged by difficult conditions, take twice as long on and around the greens as everyday players do. "That's the time championship players need to play championship golf," he said, "but it's a poor example for the rest of us. We can copy the motions they go through, but we can't come close to replicating the results."
As a result of the work by Yates and others, the USGA initiated several new policies at its major tournaments this year. It trained the referees that walk with each group to be more proactive when players fall behind. It clarified when players on par-three greens should step aside and signal the players in the next group to hit their tee shots (such call-ups were numerous in both Opens this year). And it made the criteria for when spectators could cross fairways more rigorous. As a result, in both events the speed of play improved -- by five minutes on average in the final round at the men's Open, compared with 2012, and by 10 minutes for the women.
The main goal of the USGA's project, however, is to speed up recreational golf. Using new sources of data, including real-time observations from courses around the country, the association's research department is scheduled to release what it calls "the first-ever dynamic model of pace of play" in August.
Many of the ideas that Yates and others have been preaching for years will be included. No. 3 on Yates's list of slow-play causes is player ability. As quickly as high-handicappers may try to scoot around the course, they take more shots and require more time than better golfers do, especially when they play from tees too long for their ability. No. 4 is the way courses are set up and maintained -- the speed of the greens and depth of the rough, for example.
No. 5 is a course's architectural design. Backups often start on a course's first par-three, Yates said. If tee times are spaced at eight-minute intervals, but the first par-three takes an average of 10 minutes to play, a course has a mess on its hands by the fourth or fifth group of the day. If the next hole is a par-five whose green some players try to reach in two, you know you're in for a long day.
"It's a myth that every course can be played in four hours," Yates said. One part of the USGA's project is to tweak the formula, first developed in the early 1990s, by which a course's "time par" is determined. The formula uses length, difficulty as measured by the slope rating, distances from greens to tees, cart policies and other factors. Time pars for foursomes can range from much less than four hours to more than 4 1/2 hours.
Yates says the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland is the perfect design for pace of play: "That's because it was designed by golf itself over the centuries, not by man." The first par-three is the eighth hole, preceded by four par- fours, a par-five and two more par-fours.
Pebble Beach, on the other hand, has issues. The second hole is a reachable par-five, and the par-five sixth is sandwiched by two par-threes. "No one would ever suggest changing the layout at Pebble Beach. It's one of the world's great courses. But there are things you can do," he said.
Several years ago, on the recommendation of Yates's company, Pace Manager Systems, Pebble toughened up the sixth hole to make it play a bit harder, and thus slower. "It's counterintuitive, I know, but when players take longer to play the sixth, they don't back up as much on the seventh, and they come away feeling more satisfied with the overall experience," Yates said.
The key to golfer happiness, Yates believes, is the uninterrupted flow of a round, more than the absolute time it takes. And that depends above all on staggering tee times at just the right interval for each course -- in some cases 10 or 11 minutes, as opposed to a more common seven or eight minutes -- and keeping precisely to that schedule.
"It's a delicate balance," Yates acknowledges. Courses naturally want to maximize revenue by pushing as many paying golfers as possible onto the course, but they do so at peril of alienating their clientele. "It's usually not the time itself, but the experience of time that makes people mad," Yates said. Many courses, including some run by the big national course-management groups, get the balance right, but many more fail.
Drum Buffer Rope (DBR) is a planning and scheduling solution derived from the Theory of Constraints (ToC).
The fundamental assumption of DBR is that within any plant there is one or a limited number of scarce resources which control the overall output of that plant. This is the “drum”, which sets the pace for all other resources.
In order to maximize the output of the system, planning and execution behaviors are focused on exploiting the drum, protecting it against disruption through the use of “time buffers”, and synchronizing or subordinating all other resources and decisions to the activity of the drum through a mechanism that is akin to a “rope”.
Write a well-thought out answers to the questions below:
1. Discuss the scheduling / sequencing tools discussed in the text be used to alleviate the customer service (and revenue) problem at a golf course?
2. Can the concept of Drum-Buffer-Rope (in Theory of Constraints section) be applied to this situation? Explain how.