NZ wine industry embraces automation
WineWorks and Sacred Hill lead the way with supply chain integration…
WineWorks, Sacred Hill, and Flow Software have taken a significant step towards integrating the New Zealand wine industry supply chain.
The organisations have just gone live with an automated process that allows efficient management of Sacred Hill wine from production, to bottling, warehousing, and distribution via WineWorks.
“We identified that if we could send our sales orders via EDI to WineWorks this would reduce administration processing costs, negate duplicate rekeying of orders, remove error input rates, eliminate stock from being allocated if not available and allow for more orders to be sent to WineWorks,” said Cameron Sutton, Sacred Hill production manager.
“Flow worked closely with our specialist ERP provider UXC Eclipse, which was fundamental to the success of the project,” he notes.
“Sacred Hill can now log into our online portal and view current order status within minutes of sending us the data”
Flow Software MD David Masters said systems integration is at the heart of the success of this development. “The Flow integration platform was used for the rollout and implementation process and has been a success. It was very smooth and received positively by staff and customers.”
With the initiative initially driven from the WineWorks side, Mike Brasch, group systems manager at WineWorks, said the organisation places a premium on automation; not only does it mean more efficient handling of orders, but automation also means WineWorks is able to satisfy customer needs. This is essential to build and maintain long term relationships.
“It is important for us to keep our customers satisfied in order to deliver value and ensure retention. [Thanks to this integration] we can process Sacred Hill orders more efficiently and Sacred Hill can now log into our online portal and view current order status within minutes of sending us the data,” he said.
With the first ‘warehouse to dispatch’ automation now in place, WineWorks is set to on-board other New Zealand wine producers, eliminating duplicated data entry in the ‘production to shelf’ process. This is set to reduce costs for the growing New Zealand wine industry, making its products more competitive for oenophiles around the world.
