Introducing Case Goods
From a software perspective, bottled inventory lives in no man’s land. It’s the place where operations software ends and point-of-sale and accounting systems begin. For many wineries, this mirrors the silos within functional teams as well. The winemaking team manages up to a point before it gets turned over to the tasting room staff and finance teams. Handoffs between people and systems are typical points of inefficiency. Put simply, they are areas where it's easy to drop the ball.
For wineries, that inefficiency takes the form of wasted time, inability to plan ahead, and lost revenue. Over the last few weeks, two conversations I had with the winery staff stand out in my mind. The first, with a winemaker, discussed how easy it was to lose track of inventory during busy seasons. Staff would move a few cases from the cellar to a tasting room and forget to record it. Inventories would get off from the official count quickly and they’d be forced to spend extra time tracking down the discrepancy. The second was with a tasting room manager. She shared half a dozen workarounds to record sales within their point of sale, all created so that she could track against the KPIs her team was measured against. What both had in common was they each had access to name-brand operational and point-of-sale software, and despite that, both turned to spreadsheets to get the job done.
Why? Ultimately, for both individuals, it came down to the systems’ inability to fit the reality of the work being done.
Conversations like these set our direction when we designed Case Goods. We wanted a system that could fit how the work was being done. Here’s how we applied our guiding principles to case goods:
Be Ridiculously Fast and Easy To Use
Move inventory in pallets, cases, or bottles for any task
Update one allocation or bulk update many
Remove Knowledge Barriers
Automatically create tech sheets for any wine produced within Blended
View inventory by tax status or location from any date present or past
Data Is An Asset
Generate custom reports of how inventory has changed through time
Detailed use logs for every SKU to make finding and correcting discrepancies simple
But don’t take my word for it, take a look for yourself. If it looks interesting, we’d love to show you more about how Blended is changing the way wineries operate.
