De Bortoli Wines boosts quality, compliance and optimisation with QAD

The De Bortoli Wines journey started more than 90 years ago when Vittorio De Bortoli emigrated to Australia from Northern Italy with dreams of building a better life. Vittoria purchased a fruit farm near Griffith, in the New South Wales Riverina region, and turned unwanted Shiraz grapes into wine for family and friends. From these humble beginnings, De Bortoli Wines has grown to become the sixth largest winery in the country, exporting to 75 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. 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,” says Bill Robertson, Chief Information Officer at De Bortoli Wines. “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.”

Robertson explains that one of the things that De Bortoli has managed to do over the years has been to build just-in-time agribusiness scheduling and incorporating that into its winemaking process by working with QAD. QAD Adaptive ERP for manufacturing supports operational requirements in areas such as manufacturing, financials, customer management, supply chain, service and support, analytics, business process management and integration.

“The focus of this was around quality, compliance and optimisation,” he says. “These pieces interconnect. So, when we do just-in-time scheduling of grapes, it not only optimises 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.”

As De Bortoli looks to the future, the company plans to integrate QAD’s next generation user experience (UX).

“QAD’s UX is going to 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,” says Shane Dunn, Business Analyst at De Bortoli Wines. “We’re using QAD to track all wine specifications from grape to bottle. The current feature set is highly configurable, and we’re using this to print a certificate of analysis form for the customer, which shows all the specifications that they have asked for and how they match.”

Robertson adds: “We’re also really excited about where QAD is going with its new user experience. The application programming interfaces (APIs) will allow us to integrate with things like manufacturing execution systems, our constraint-based scheduling systems and our supply chain integration. The ability to deploy on multiple devices is going to be critical.

“There are so many pieces to where QAD is going, not just in the immediate future but the long-term, that aligns with what we want to achieve. We’re really excited by where QAD is going with its new UX. If we had a wish list of the roadmap for our ERP solution, QAD ticks the boxes.”

www.qad.com
www.debortoli.com.au