|
Even the fermenting of grape juice into wine can be monitored on the Web; Korbel uses Acrolon Technologies Inc.'s TankNET system to precisely track what's going on in storage tanks.
The telecom infrastructure also needed beefing up. The Russian River area may be scenic, but winter storms are hard on phone lines, which fail annually, cutting off email and Internet access at the winery. So Barnes built a wireless satellite network to link its headquarters with its warehouse at the nearby Santa Rosa airport and other facilities.
"It's reduced our cost and improved bandwidth," Barnes says. "We implemented new redundant broadband wireless data circuits to connect a number of our facilities in Sonoma County. This reduced data circuit 'connect' costs considerably from our previous copper connection costs. Since a healthy amount of the data circuits in this part of the county required upgrades, our reliability increased as well."
After two years at Korbel, Barnes found that he had pretty much revamped the company's entire technology platform.
"Things weren't totally desperate," he says. "I inherited a good group. What we really needed was some good training. I just helped them turn the corner."
C-Level Lunches
Most business days, Korbel's executives gather at the estate's pool house for a catered lunch -- one of the perks of the winery, but also a valuable forum for communication about the business. "At large corporations, if you have an IT idea, you have to write it up in triplicate and send it up to God-knows-how-many levels, and by the time it gets back to you it's out of date," says Barnes. "Here I can talk to Gary and tell him something and get an answer right away."
Still, Barnes has tried to introduce more formal governance processes. One of his first initiatives was to start an IT project steering committee. And every quarter Barnes publishes an IT update, telling the rest of the company what his department is doing.
Nothing, he says, was more important than building credibility within the organization -- first by smoothing out the ERP deployment, then by reconciling the BI discrepancies. "All you really need is a couple of successes and that opens the door," he says. "Now we can't do enough. A little of that goes a long way. We've stabilized a lot of the operations and allowed them to have an integrated system to do their job a lot more effectively."
Korbel is now upgrading its ERP (JD Edwards release 8.12) and BI systems, deploying dashboards and looking to share sales information with distributors and retailers to better understand what is selling, at what price and where. Bar codes allow individual wines to be tracked with optical scanners from the bottling line to the checkout line, providing real-time sales data.
"The first two years were just 'Solve the problems and get things right,' " Barnes says. "Now it's about being a more efficient and productive organization. I see us getting into a lot more analysis of what we sell and who we sell to, what's profitable, who's buying what, making projections and accurate forecasting.
"It's a fascinating business," he says. "You put a plant in the ground and have to figure out what kind of grapes will be selling in several years."
Michael Ybarra is a contributing writer for SearchCIO-Midmarket.com. Write to him at editor@ciodecisions.com.
|
