Taylors Wines Tastes Data-Driven Financial Success with BOARD
Announcement posted by BOARD International 07 Feb 2019
Sydney, 7 February 2019 - Board International, the # 1 decision making platform for organisations of any size, has announced that Taylors Wines is using BOARD for integrated planning, analysis and reporting as part of its strategy to become a data-driven business.
Taylors Wines, a family-owned winery that crafts great Australian wines in the Clare Valley, South Australia, wanted to make a greater amount of information available to its management, sales, marketing and finance teams - wherever they happened to be working.
The business utilises data to support sales growth in stores, restaurants and bars that stock Taylors Wines; to better understand demand and use that to manage stock levels and production; to measure the impact of winning international wine competitions on sales; and to accurately track rebates it paid out to customers.
Prior to the BOARD deployment ,Taylors Wines was running its business off just three reports: a direct sales report updated daily, a monthly P&L, and a static PDF produced monthly for its area sales team.
All the reports had limitations: the direct sales and P&L reports could only be interrogated by finance, meaning many emails from people trying to understand what data sat behind the results in front of them. The static PDF report, meanwhile, was hard to read on iPads used by the area sales team.
“Finance was spending so much time creating reports rather than analysing them,” said Hamza Jinwala, Finance Manager, Taylors Wines. “Our main goal was to make information available to people on the go, as and when they need it, without relying on us. Instead of relying on a sales analyst or finance team members if and when they wanted to get the information, we wanted to let them just go and get the information themselves.”
The BOARD reporting tool primarily runs on top of Taylors Wines’ data warehouse and also links directly to other internal data sources such as customer relationship management (CRM) and various Excel worksheets. The organisation has increased the number of reports it produces from three to over 100, unlocking latent demand for data and value for the organisation.
Where area managers were previously only measured on revenue, now they also use BOARD to track who sells what ranges and brands, where they are running in-store promotions and retail displays, and other metrics. They use BOARD to identify gaps, opportunities and to create a shortlist of customers to visit. These are all new capabilities. In addition, we have a dashboard and get the information updated to sales managers every week or more frequently if we want to.”
Long-term profitability and stock levels can also be easily measured.
“We’ve been able to create a long-term forecasting model whereby we can actually look at what our profit is going to look like for the next five years, and based on that we can discuss what sort of initiatives we’re able to afford in the future,” Jinwala says.
“We also used to hold quite a bit of safety stock just so we didn’t run out, but now with BOARD we are producing weekly forecasts that are fed into the production planning schedules so they can be changed to avoid running out of stock and losing sales.”
BOARD makes it easier to reliably check rebate claims filed by customers.
“We’ve got hundreds of customers who would send in their rebate claims. We wouldn’t even bother checking whether they were correct because there was no source to check them against. Now we just go into BOARD and look at whether the claim is valid or not,” Jinwala says.
Another major benefit of BOARD is that Taylors Wines can see how winning wine medals and displaying these on its bottles impacts sales.
Prior to BOARD, the impact on sales was completely unknown. “Depending on the type of medal and prestige of the competition, we’ve seen a 15 to 20 percent increase in sales on bottles with more than two medals on the label,” Jinwala says.
“We didn’t know this before or even enter that many wine shows, but as we’ve started tracking the sales uplift via BOARD, we’ve been able to enter more wine shows and win more awards.”
BOARD occupies a critical place in Taylors Wines’ operations.
“It’s just simple things we now take for granted. From a company perspective it was a great decision to deploy BOARD because we were able to become more efficient and achieve cost savings. And because everyone is so much more self-sufficient, the finance team is now free to concentrate on bigger and better things,” Jinwala adds.
About BOARD International:
BOARD is the #1 decision-making platform for organizations of any size. Founded in 1994, BOARD International has enabled more than 3000 companies worldwide to rapidly deploy Business Intelligence, Corporate Performance Management and Predictive Analytics applications on a single unified and programming-free platform. The BOARD platform allows companies to achieve a single, accurate and complete view of business information and a full control of performance across the entire organization, from strategic formulation down to operational execution. Thanks to its programming-free toolkit approach, global enterprises such as H&M, KPMG, DHL, Mitsubishi, NEC, Puma, Siemens, Toyota have rapidly deployed end-to end decision-making applications in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions. Headquartered in Chiasso, Switzerland, and Boston, MA, BOARD International has 21 offices around the world and a global reseller network. BOARD has been implemented in over 100 countries. www.board.com
Taylors Wines, a family-owned winery that crafts great Australian wines in the Clare Valley, South Australia, wanted to make a greater amount of information available to its management, sales, marketing and finance teams - wherever they happened to be working.
The business utilises data to support sales growth in stores, restaurants and bars that stock Taylors Wines; to better understand demand and use that to manage stock levels and production; to measure the impact of winning international wine competitions on sales; and to accurately track rebates it paid out to customers.
Prior to the BOARD deployment ,Taylors Wines was running its business off just three reports: a direct sales report updated daily, a monthly P&L, and a static PDF produced monthly for its area sales team.
All the reports had limitations: the direct sales and P&L reports could only be interrogated by finance, meaning many emails from people trying to understand what data sat behind the results in front of them. The static PDF report, meanwhile, was hard to read on iPads used by the area sales team.
“Finance was spending so much time creating reports rather than analysing them,” said Hamza Jinwala, Finance Manager, Taylors Wines. “Our main goal was to make information available to people on the go, as and when they need it, without relying on us. Instead of relying on a sales analyst or finance team members if and when they wanted to get the information, we wanted to let them just go and get the information themselves.”
The BOARD reporting tool primarily runs on top of Taylors Wines’ data warehouse and also links directly to other internal data sources such as customer relationship management (CRM) and various Excel worksheets. The organisation has increased the number of reports it produces from three to over 100, unlocking latent demand for data and value for the organisation.
Where area managers were previously only measured on revenue, now they also use BOARD to track who sells what ranges and brands, where they are running in-store promotions and retail displays, and other metrics. They use BOARD to identify gaps, opportunities and to create a shortlist of customers to visit. These are all new capabilities. In addition, we have a dashboard and get the information updated to sales managers every week or more frequently if we want to.”
Long-term profitability and stock levels can also be easily measured.
“We’ve been able to create a long-term forecasting model whereby we can actually look at what our profit is going to look like for the next five years, and based on that we can discuss what sort of initiatives we’re able to afford in the future,” Jinwala says.
“We also used to hold quite a bit of safety stock just so we didn’t run out, but now with BOARD we are producing weekly forecasts that are fed into the production planning schedules so they can be changed to avoid running out of stock and losing sales.”
BOARD makes it easier to reliably check rebate claims filed by customers.
“We’ve got hundreds of customers who would send in their rebate claims. We wouldn’t even bother checking whether they were correct because there was no source to check them against. Now we just go into BOARD and look at whether the claim is valid or not,” Jinwala says.
Another major benefit of BOARD is that Taylors Wines can see how winning wine medals and displaying these on its bottles impacts sales.
Prior to BOARD, the impact on sales was completely unknown. “Depending on the type of medal and prestige of the competition, we’ve seen a 15 to 20 percent increase in sales on bottles with more than two medals on the label,” Jinwala says.
“We didn’t know this before or even enter that many wine shows, but as we’ve started tracking the sales uplift via BOARD, we’ve been able to enter more wine shows and win more awards.”
BOARD occupies a critical place in Taylors Wines’ operations.
“It’s just simple things we now take for granted. From a company perspective it was a great decision to deploy BOARD because we were able to become more efficient and achieve cost savings. And because everyone is so much more self-sufficient, the finance team is now free to concentrate on bigger and better things,” Jinwala adds.
About BOARD International:
BOARD is the #1 decision-making platform for organizations of any size. Founded in 1994, BOARD International has enabled more than 3000 companies worldwide to rapidly deploy Business Intelligence, Corporate Performance Management and Predictive Analytics applications on a single unified and programming-free platform. The BOARD platform allows companies to achieve a single, accurate and complete view of business information and a full control of performance across the entire organization, from strategic formulation down to operational execution. Thanks to its programming-free toolkit approach, global enterprises such as H&M, KPMG, DHL, Mitsubishi, NEC, Puma, Siemens, Toyota have rapidly deployed end-to end decision-making applications in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions. Headquartered in Chiasso, Switzerland, and Boston, MA, BOARD International has 21 offices around the world and a global reseller network. BOARD has been implemented in over 100 countries. www.board.com