There are times when it has felt like the golf industry has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Now the technology penny is finally starting to drop, you sometimes wonder how any club ever coped before.

Cast your minds back even a few years and the very notion of members booking their weekend fourball via an app on a smartphone would have seemed like a far-fetched vision of the future. The rusty old ball chute by the first tee or the sign-up board in the locker room did the job, but there is another way, a quicker way, an easier way.

Belfast-based Obbi Golf’s Gareth Macklin wrestled with that principle when it came to addressing the difficulties of some of the inner workings of golf management – most notably around the thorny subjects of compliance, safety and training.

Unhappy with the options presented to him when he sat on the other side of the fence during operational roles in hospitality and care home management, the 42-year-old entrepreneur took matters into his own hands and devised his own system which was then brought to digital life by his team of tech experts.

Macklin explained: “The whole idea was borne out of frustration. We spoke to a vast array of companies and none of them were suitable. I just felt there had to be a better way.

“We were trying to find a product to make our own businesses better around compliance, safety and training and while there were lots of individual solutions available, there was nothing that brought the whole thing together for the operational team – including the management.

“As an operator, I didn’t want to have lots of different systems – I want it all in the same place and under one system. It didn’t need to be complicated – it just needed to be easy to use for the most senior manager down to the operational staff on the floor. The bottom line is, I couldn’t find it anywhere.

“So, I literally drew this idea up on a whiteboard and some clever people then took that information and built it accordingly. We started a software company the next day.

“Honestly, that’s exactly how it happened,” Macklin explained.

Those at the sharp end of golf management will know the challenges all too well. Finding the balance of time and resources is notoriously difficult and effective communication between departments is vital.

Macklin said: “There are a few main areas where we really help golf clubs: compliance, safety and training of their people, processes and property. It’s a web-based platform that has been in use for six years in construction and manufacturing, but we launched in the golf market just over a year ago.

“Our senior team are all from an operational background, so we have stood in the shoes of our clients daily. We know their pain points as we experienced them ourselves.

“It’s a bit like a waterfall effect. The general manager is trying to pass information down the club through heads of departments and members of staff and then that action must be passed back up the waterfall.

“For so many clubs, its email, it’s Excel documents or a note on someone’s desk.

“So we’ve reversed the waterfall and feed the correct information directly to the staff member and the information is then stored away securely – all by logging on to Obbi Golf.

“It’s that instant availability of the information and the timesaving involved that appeals to clubs. So if I’m a greenkeeper and want to look at a safety certificate before using a piece of machinery, or if I was a head greenkeeper and wanted to check on all of my staff’s safety training or a general manager checking our safety certificates, I can do all of that in a few seconds.

“This system cuts about 76 per cent of admin time – you’re not going through filing cabinets looking for documents that have been stored incorrectly when you most need them. It’s also about mitigating the risk and for a general manager. We give them complete peace of mind.

“Have we done our audits on machinery and fire safety checks? Is the safety certificate up-to-date for when contractors come on site? All of those answers probably sit in a filing cabinet somewhere. But we all know how difficult it is to find that information quickly when you really need it.

“If you have your fire safety certificate coming up in two months, a sheet of paper is not going to jump out of the filing cabinet to remind you. But our system gives you reminders in advance as and when any of those things are going to expire or require action.”

Aside from the reduction of admin and easing the workflow process, there are major benefits in avoiding legal liability.

Macklin said: “We spoke to more than 100 golf clubs in our initial research phase, some with committees and board members. Some of them don’t realise when they may have a legal responsibility if something goes wrong at the club.

“Heaven forbid there is a fire or someone gets seriously hurt, committee members or general managers can sometimes be held legally responsible, rather than their clubs, over compliance issues.

“If an accident happens at a club and the regulators come in to check on safety certificates, you need to be able to prove those documents exist.

“Whether people choose to do that with our system or a pen and paper, it doesn’t make a difference as long as it’s done. We just make it an awful lot simpler and quicker.”

The platform can be tailored to suit clubs of any size with more than 50 clients already signed up in the first 12 months and the future looks bright after a recent £1.25m investment to take the business to the next level.

Macklin said: “We’re currently concentrating on the UK and Irish market but the medium-term plan is to take that to a more global basis and the longer term is to move into other sports and the insurance industry.

“We’re already speaking to a Premier League football club, horse racing, yachting, rugby and this is just early research. We’ve had very positive feedback so far.

“Our smallest club at the moment has seven staff and our biggest one has about 250-300 but I suppose the biggest challenge is educating people that there is a better way.

“It’s the way we all did it for years and years. But once people see the product and the simplicity of it, they get it. We’ve also seen clubs having a reduction in their insurance premiums because of implementing the system.”

And Macklin draws a comparison with another seismic shift in recent times on the modernisation of golf clubs. He said: “If you think back to the early 2000s and your club’s tee booking system, did most clubs embrace that idea to start with? Probably not.

“Some clubs had the ball chute or a sign-up board but now we all book our tee times from our phones and the thought of not having it seems alien to everyone.

“Some will always be wary of the technology but they just need to be made aware of what it can do with a bit of knowledge and education.

“There will be people out there who don’t realise they have a problem in the first place or wouldn’t know how to solve it if they do know they have a problem. But if you can’t tell me or someone if you are compliant with something in the next five seconds, you need to speak to us to see how we can help.”

Embracing technology can often meet resistance when it is seen as over-complicating a task. But when it makes everyone’s life easier, it’s hard to make an argument against it.