WALKER STEVENSON LTD
Sour grapes on the wine estate- lost revenue opportunities in new export markets
Chilean winery has expanded into new export markets after making large investments in marketing campaigns abroad and a new customer relationships management software tool. Product demands by the commercial teams are not aligned with sales forecasts reducing opportunities to gain revenue as order fulfillments continue to be delayed or cancelled.
-Background-
Chilean winemaker deployed a new strategy to include significant investments in environmental sustainability across their estate and a new customer relationship management software (CRM) to unlock new revenue opportunities in foreign markets. New sales deals increased by 300% overwhelming their production team who no longer could plan, report and forecasts inventory requirements effectively to meet new demands causing loss in revenue and degrading brand reputation with customers.
-Methods-
Walker Stevenson (WS) conducted half day workshop with the owners and Management team to complete an assessment across the winery IT estate to determine what data was available to decision makers responsible for production and sales management. Then we conducted a discovery session to identify the complete end-to-end process maps across both sales and production functions through an intensive one day workshop that allowed us to gather both quantitative and qualitative data.
-Results-
We identified the production team was using a legacy software application that was no longer supported by the original vendor causing the production teams to extract data from the application and re-upload the data into manually created excel sheets. These excel sheets were solely being used by the production team to determine current inventory levels and cycle time outputs per batch processing. Production teams lacked the capabilities to plan production cycle counts and report accurate inventory levels due to manual data manipulation across multiple people. There was no consistency in the data.
-Conclusion-
PProduction teams were limited in their capabilities to provide accuracy in their data reporting to sales due to an outdated software application while sales was not able to accurately report on product lead times to new customers. WS provided immediate tactical changes to their data estate that allowed for improved visibility for inventory management and production cycle time while recommending three low cost solutions to replace the legacy production software.