Customer Case Study

DE BORTOLI WINES

The Company:

UPGRADING TO QAD ADAPTIVE UX ALLOWS DE BORTOLI TO CONTINUE LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY ACROSS A COMPLEX SUPPLY CHAIN

The De Bortoli Wines journey started over 95 years ago when Vittorio De Bortoli emigrated from Northern Italy with dreams of building a better life. Vittorio purchased a fruit farm near Griffith, Australia in the New South Wales Riverina region and turned unwanted Shiraz grapes into wine for family and friends — those were the beginnings of one of Australia’s largest family-owned wineries. Since its humble beginnings, De Bortoli Wines has grown to become the sixth largest winery in the country, exporting to 70 countries around the world with bottling plant operations in Europe and distribution in the UK.

Operating estates across ﬁve Australian winemaking regions, De Bortoli Wines has also demonstrated a strong commitment to sustainability and views this as a key philosophy of leaving a positive legacy for future generations.

Over nearly 20 years, De Bortoli Wines has been recognized for its quest to become a zero-waste winery, receiving numerous awards and accolades for their work on wise water management, energy efficiency and improved waste management. With a vision for a future where great wine and a healthy environment can be enjoyed by everyone, De Bortoli Wines converted 10 to 15% of the vineyards in some regions to organic and installed a solar photovoltaic system that will reduce its reliance on imported power by 30%.

COMPANY HIGHLIGHTS

Company

De Bortoli Wines

Headquarters
Bilbul, NSW, Australia

Industry

Food & Beverage

Products

Wine

Solutions Utilized

QAD Adaptive ERP

QAD Adaptive UX

The Challenge:

A COMPLEX SUPPLY CHAIN MEANS FLEXIBLE SYSTEMS ARE REQUIRED TO MAINTAIN GRAPE TO GLASS TRACEABILITY

De Bortoli Wines operates a complex vertically and horizontally integrated business model that encompasses wine production and distribution from grape to glass.

“De Bortoli is a vertically integrated business that is involved in every part of the wine industry and can be thought of as not just one company, but as a collection of quite distinct businesses. We have businesses that grow grapes, make wine, package wine, warehouse wine, transport wine, and sell wine, including direct to consumer via our own physical and online retail presence,” states Robertson.

“In terms of our horizontal integration, we source grapes from our growers and from others, we buy and sell grapes, we buy and sell bulk wines, we ship bulk wine overseas for bottling, we export our wine, we import wine, we joint venture products. Additionally, we buy and sell logistics and warehousing services and try to service every feasible route to market,” continues Robertson.

“One of the interesting things with De Bortoli is, as a structural point of view, we have control over our whole supply chain. But to get competitive advantage out of that, we have to be able to ﬂow information through and to get value out of that,“ adds Robertson.

Leveraging technology across De Bortoli Wines’ business units to achieve compliance, optimization and quality simultaneously was central to the company’s drive to extract competitive value.

“The real value of an integrated solution across multiple business units is visibility - across grapes, wine-making, bottling, logistics, and all the way to the consumer.”

Bill Robertson, CIO, De Bortoli Wines

About the Partner:

ATTURRA

Atturra is an advisory and IT solutions provider that has been part of the QAD Partner Network since 2005. The company is headquartered in Sydney, Australia and has offices across the nation and in New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Atturra has a team of more than 1,000 staff, including a dedicated team of consultants, technical specialists and programmers that have specialized in QAD Adaptive Applications for nearly 20 years and support more than 70 QAD clients, including De Bortoli Wines. The company takes pride in tailoring its services to the unique needs of manufacturers, equipping clients with the expertise and resources needed to thrive in an industry prone to change.

“We can't always be experts in everything. Atturra’s manufacturing consulting team provides width across all parts of QAD and each of the consultants has depth in their areas of expertise,” explains Bill Robertson, CIO, De Bortoli Wines. “That width and depth of knowledge is critical for us to be able to do the projects that we need to do.”

The company is a longstanding partner of De Bortoli Wines and has assisted with multiple projects, including upgrading to the latest version of QAD Adaptive ERP with Adaptive UX.

The Solution:

MOVING TO QAD ADAPTIVE UX, COMBINED WITH JUST-IN-TIME SCHEDULING, HELPS DE BORTOLI BUILD A FUTURE-PROOF ENTERPRISE

“One of the things that De Bortoli has managed to do over the years by working with QAD has been building agri-business just-in-time scheduling and incorporating that into our winemaking process. The focus of this was around quality, compliance and optimization. These pieces interconnect,” explains Robertson.

“When we do just-in-time scheduling of grapes, it not only optimizes our deliveries for our growers and for ourselves, it also improves the quality. When we do things like the online spray diaries, that not only helps with our compliance but it also helps with the efficiency. When we have traceability through our blends, that also helps with our compliance. It also helps with our quality. So, all of these pieces have really provided a basis for a sustained, competitive advantage.”

QAD Adaptive ERP and its just-in-time scheduling capabilities made it much easier for De Bortoli Wines to navigate the complexities of its vertically and horizontally integrated business, but leadership didn’t want to stop there. The company recognized that its needs would continue to evolve and wanted to ensure its ERP and user experience (UX) were equally agile. When the new version of QAD Adaptive ERP with Adaptive UX became available, De Bortoli Wines worked with QAD partner Atturra to upgrade.

“We knew it would support De Bortoli’s vision of sustainability by bringing all the disparate pieces of information and software into one cohesive ERP that we’ll be able to leverage for a long time,” states Shane Dunn, Business Analyst, De Bortoli Wines.

“De Bortoli chose to upgrade to Adaptive UX because we were on the same page as QAD in terms of where the software needed to get to and where we needed to go. A lot of our issues are around integrating various pieces of the organization, whether it's connecting to manufacturing execution systems (MES) or a point of sale,” adds Robertson. “If you want to hold all of your data in ERP, you need to be able to do those interactions.”

“Atturra was critical in the upgrade process. The main value that Atturra provided in our upgrade was again back to that of knowledge; understanding of all the capabilities of the system in terms of the changes that we had to make at both a business and technical level. Atturra also provided a really valuable service in training,” explains Robertson.

The Benefits:

DE BORTOLI BOOSTS VISIBILITY INTO A COMPLEX INTEGRATED SUPPLY CHAIN AND BUILDS RESILIENCE WITH POWERFUL, UNINTRUSIVE EXTENSIBILITY, VIA QAD ADAPTIVE UX

“Our agri-business supply chain scheduling has allowed us to focus on quality, compliance and optimization simultaneously. We’ve been able to optimize our growers resources by giving them 15-minute delivery slots rather than waiting for hours,” states Robertson.

“It also improves our quality when we bring through the information into our winemaking systems. We get traceability all the way from the vineyard throughout our systems, throughout the manufacturing plant, through to the bottle. And our quality has obviously improved by the fact that we’re not leaving grapes sitting in trucks, and we can blend all the way through and get the quality that our consumers expect.”

With QAD Adaptive UX as a foundational component of harmonizing business processes and systems, De Bortoli Wines is also prepared for whatever the future may bring. “One of the advantages that Adaptive UX provides is the extensibility of the platform. We're a complex and messy business. As part of that, there will always be customizations required,” explains Robertson.

“You want those customizations to be non-intrusive so that you can continually, regularly upgrade. You need to regularly upgrade to be able to have access to the latest features, to have access to the latest security. So that's a given. But you also don't want to have to re-engineer all of your changes to the system, all of your customizations,” concludes Robertson.

“What Adaptive UX provides is a non-intrusive way of providing those customizations that can be brought forward as you upgrade your system.”

“QAD has been a great company to work with. One of the things that’s really nice is, like us, they’re a very approachable business. And that’s something that relates to us. They also have tenure of executives and of their senior people. The tenure works well with us as a family business. It means you can build relationships. You can work with those relationships and achieve long-term goals.”