The Shout Magazine (New Zealand)

WineWorks and Sacred Hill lead the way with supply chain integration

rsz_sacred_hill_pinot_grisWineWorks, 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 a new automated process that allows efficient management of the wine to bottling, warehousing, and distribution of Sacred Hill wine 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. ” says Cameron Sutton, Production Manager of Sacred Hill. “Flow worked closely with our specialist ERP provider UXC Eclipse, which was fundamental to the success of the project”, notes Sutton.

David Masters, Managing Director of Flow Software said, “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, the Group Systems Manager at WineWorks, understands how valuable automation is within the wine industry. Not only does it mean more efficient handling of orders but also means that WineWorks are able to satisfy their customer needs in order to maintain a long-term relationship.

“It is important for us to keep our customers happy in order to ensure customer retention. We are happy that we can process Sacred Hill orders more efficiently and that also Sacred Hill can now log into our online portal and view the current order status for each of their orders within minutes of sending us the data” says Mike.

With the first warehouse to dispatch automation now in place, WineWorks will be onboarding other New Zealand wine producers to streamline any duplicated data entry in the production to shelf process thus helping to reduce costs for the growing New Zealand wine industry.