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Barnes to the ERP Rescue
It was 2002 when Korbel decided to hire its first CIO; it found Barnes through a search firm. Barnes had an MBA in finance and a background at IBM, where he rose from computer operator to project manager. When Korbel called, he was CIO at a New York equipment distribution company, which had recently gone through a JD Edwards rollout. (JD Edwards has since been acquired by Oracle.) Korbel, too, was deploying a JD Edwards ERP system -- but not without trouble. It was trying to replace its unsupported, legacy Pansophic ERP system, and the project was a mess. Barnes was hired to fix things.
"The JD Edwards implementation was not going well," Barnes says. "We were behind budget and timeline. They were trying to implement too many modules. I said, 'Let's take a step back and see what needs to be done.' My philosophy is take it off-the-shelf, tweak it but don't enhance it because when you upgrade you have a potential nightmare. I like a phased approach, not a big bang."
Barnes found that the financial and HR modules were working well, but order entry and pricing needed work. Distribution and manufacturing apps were still on the drawing board.
Korbel had hired a consulting firm to handle the deployment, but Barnes realized he needed more control of the project, so he took it in-house. "The biggest challenge was taking control of the project back from the consulting firm and being responsible for running it ourselves," he says. "I had full management support. It just required a little direction, a lot of support and putting a plan in place. We had a situation where we had outside consultants running part of the project and internal staff handling other tasks. Since we were ultimately going to be responsible for this software, we felt it made a lot more sense to take responsibility for the project as a whole. We changed some internal staff responsibilities, sent internal staff for training, and people quickly embraced the fact that this was 'their' system. Since then, we have never looked back or had any problems supporting or upgrading our JDE ERP system."
BI on the Vine
While Barnes was straightening out the ERP mess, Korbel president Gary Heck handed him another problem. The company's business intelligence system didn't seem all that, well, intelligent. Heck would sign on daily to the Cognos BI system and often the number of cases of wine that were bottled was different than the number being stored in the warehouse. "How'd I lose 500 cases in 50 feet?" Heck would ask.
"We had reconciliation issues," Barnes says. "The numbers didn't match. Our legacy BI system was an outdated reporting system that had been modified and updated considerably by previous internal staff." Fortunately, the new JDE system and a BI upgrade (to Cognos 8i), which went live in August, solved that problem, Barnes says.
Now reconciliation problems are a thing of the past and the winery has a powerful tool for evaluating how the business is going. "We still bring in grapes [and] process and blend and bottle them," says Korbel's wine quality manager, Lisa Russell, who has been at the company for 20 years. "But tracking has gotten a whole lot more detailed. I have a bigger picture of how the business runs, how costs flow through the company from grape contracts to finished goods."
Indeed, IT is seeping into every corner of the winery, including the barrels used to age various kinds of wine (different oak imparts different flavors and needs to be periodically retreated). These days, Korbel uses eSkye's barrel-tracking system, which automates the process of charting a barrel's working life. The winemaker can see what kinds of oak barrels are available, what wine is being stored where, how many times a barrel has been refilled and when it's due for retirement. "Barrel tracking has proved to be an enormous success," says Barnes, "allowing us to better manage our wine aging process and track barrel costs while improving the overall quality of our product."
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