The Swiss Golf and Landscape Architect firm Steiner & Partner has recently launched a new service called GolfView, a Swiss made geographic information system (GIS) platform available exclusively to golf course operators and available in German, French and English. This GIS will help organise course data and manage facilities more efficiently with regard to maintenance, planning renovations or communication.
“Golf courses are very demanding green recreation facilities. With large areas and often difficult environmental restrictions it can be a real challenge for golf clubs to keep a finger on all the surfaces that need attention. This system can bring all data together in one place and keep it up to date”, says Erich Steiner.
GolfView’s digital plans effectively offer many advantages over traditional management. They are able to display layered maps such as orthophotos, grass surfaces, vegetation, water bodies and environmental areas, irrigation and drainage, paths, buildings and other infrastructure. And these different layers can be displayed individually or combined. With its various tools, GolfView can, among other things, measure lengths and areas, help to plan maintenance budgets, manage tree inventories or even record daily pin-positions. Going forward, this GIS data can be used to inform GPS guided machinery for automated maintenance.
This GIS is also a perfect tool for communication during meetings and presentations and greenkeepers can access their centrally managed golf course information from anywhere with a simple web browser. The greenkeeper or manager can also add changes and notes to this plan at any time. In this way the plan becomes a personalised tool for the golf club team which they have with them at all times. They can really work with it on a daily basis, whether it’s for managing and documenting a small renovation project or jotting down notes for tournaments or daily play that need to be communicated to golfers.
With this data at your fingertips, you can also share environmental information with government or NGOs to show your environmental stewardship and see who is responsible for the management of each parcel of land. For clubs who are using an environmental management tool like GEO’s OnCourse, a GIS like GolfView is a fantastic complementary tool to help organise data and quickly bring up the necessary information for benchmarking and communicating the great work that golf is doing for nature protection and environmental management.
As it stands now almost 20% of all Swiss clubs are already on board and interest is springing up from other countries throughout Europe. Our clients are not only equipped with a great easy-to-use digital tool for golf course management, they are also supported by a team of golf course architects and environmental experts who know what clubs need.
The key to golf course management in the future will be effective data management and it is important to recognise that the digitisation of this data is essential in our sustainability efforts. GolfView will help clubs move in this direction.