For businesses to scale, they must apply innovative technological solutions. PURE the Winery did just that, using Oracle Netsuite to support its vision of creating a new category in the wine industry. Stuart Foster, Financial Controller & Investor, PURE The Winery, provides insight into this implementation.
PURE The Winery, an award-winning sugar-free wine distributor, is using Oracle NetSuite to support its vision of creating a new category in the wine industry. With NetSuite, PURE The Winery has been able to take advantage of an integrated business platform to better align production with demand, improve the speed and accuracy of its financial processes and navigate the complex tax requirements of cross-border alcohol trade as it embarks on ambitious growth plans.
Founded by former Coca-Cola executives in 2019, PURE The Winery distributes award-winning sugar-free Italian wines. To meet the growing demand for healthier alcohol options and to better manage the compliance requirements of trading across markets in Europe, the US, Asia and Australia, PURE The Winery needed to replace its existing business systems. After careful evaluation, PURE The Winery replaced QuickBooks with NetSuite. PURE The Winery has since centralised business operations on a single platform, optimised its financial and inventory operations, successfully adopted a direct-to-consumer sales model after stores and restaurants closed due to the pandemic and scaled its business,
Intelligent SME speaks to Stuart Foster, Financial Controller & Investor, PURE The Winery, about the company and how Oracle NetSuite’s solutions have enabled the business to scale.
- Can you tell us more about the challenges you were looking to address ahead of selecting this solution?
Shortly after our launch in 2019 we had started to develop wholesale and retail channels for the international distribution of PURE zero sugar wine and were expecting to continue growing rapidly, but then circumstances quickly changed.
Early 2020 was a very difficult time for all wholesale distributors, with sales plummeting as hundreds of stores, bars and restaurants were forced to close due to the pandemic. We were forced to suspend plans for international expansion through resale channels and brick-and-mortar retail. We had to pivot to online, to focus on direct-to-consumer sales of wine to get back on our path to growth.
This significant new sales channel highlighted the need for us to better align wine production with demand. A big challenge for running a wine production and international distribution business is effective forward planning, as we are often looking months ahead with our production partner in Italy, and now had more direct-to-consumer sales to consider too.
In addition, we had our ongoing operational requirements to consider. We needed a more effective way to monitor our wine bottle stocks in various locations around the world and to better navigate the latest regulations and complex tax requirements of cross-border alcohol trade.
We also needed to improve the speed and accuracy of our financial processes to save our team time. We were using QuickBooks to record accounting transactions, but our teams had to manually check everything from cash receipts to stock levels of our different wine varieties on a country-by-country basis, which wasn’t as efficient or sustainable.
We looked to Oracle NetSuite to adopt an integrated system that includes financials, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), inventory management and omnichannel commerce, to help us grow and better adapt to change.
- When did the implementation take place?
Q1 2020. Working alongside NetSuite partner Wipro, we implemented NetSuite in three months across our core markets: currently Europe, US, Asia and Australia.
- Did you encounter any challenges during implementation and how were these overcome?
The biggest challenge to our implementation of NetSuite was working out the best way to build the various manufacturing stages and nuances of our wine production into the system. We don’t control the different processes such as crop yield and fermentation as we only take ownership of the finished product, but we needed to bring together this data alongside our e-commerce channels and in-country demand and compliance requirements.
Centralising all this in one place was crucial to managing our wine inventory, helping production and delivery to meet demand in time, in each country e.g., to fulfil trends such as a greater desire for red wine from our German webstore.
- How did the NetSuite team (and/or partners) ensure a seamless integration?
The rollout of NetSuite was made seamless through Wipro’s global network of NetSuite experts and the fact that the NetSuite system offers personalisation and customisation, so we can easily integrate with other applications, such as our webstore: WooCommerce.
- How have your end users benefited from this?
Now we have complete insight into expected peaks in supply and demand for our wines, we can work closely with our manufacturing partners to meet customer demand.
With our new efficiencies, we can continue to scale too, adding new logistics centres for faster in-country delivery of our products. We’re also adding more countries into our operations – including France, Italy and Ireland in 2022 – to reach more consumers that want low-calorie, sugar-free wines.
- What have been the key business benefits of this solution and far would you say this solution has enabled your organisation to scale?
Our sugar-free wines are now shipped to 15 countries and can be found in hundreds of supermarkets, restaurants and wine outlets worldwide. We’re currently forecasting sales of over one million bottles and €10 million (USD$11.3 million) for 2022.
This growth wouldn’t have been possible without NetSuite. The system has enabled us to launch webstores across Europe quickly, due to seamless integration with our e-commerce software and the ability to better forecast wine production needs from our partner in Italy. Our online wine transactions have now expanded to make up around 75% of our annual sales.
It’s also now much easier to manage the demand-related intricacies and needs of our different markets: currently Europe, USA, Asia and Australia. For example, our teams now know how many wine bottles to distribute to the US months in advance; or how to prepare for demand for red wine in Germany; or ramp up supply for greater quantities of rosé during the summer months.
In addition, NetSuite OneWorld, gives us instant access to country-specific currency, tax and legal compliance differences with an always-on audit trail of transactions. This has allowed us to automate the tax compliance process, which is notoriously complicated in Europe with its multiple tax codes, regulations and languages. The NetSuite system preconfigures up-to-date tax compliance for every locale. By removing the time our accounting staff need to spend on tax and compliance, we have increased their productivity by 40%.
Overall, by bringing together all our multi-country accounting and wine inventory management processes on the NetSuite system, we are saving up to eight days of work per quarter compared to when using our previous system.
- What advice would you offer other organisations looking to implement similar technology?
If you’re an international business that is looking to scale and achieve rapid growth, don’t hesitate in choosing a cloud-based solution that brings everything together in one place.
Centralise your financial, inventory, production, CRM and e-commerce systems so they are working together seamlessly to gain operational efficiencies and the benefits of saving days of company time will be evident across your business.