The power of industry specific software

When looking for software to manage your wine business you have two options. You can choose to go for large vendors with one-size-fits-all solutions or you can opt for sector specific software.

Except it’s designed for standard business and product/ service models. The reality is that wine and spirits don’t neatly fit the mould.

Configuration quickly turns into customization. Customization turns into compromise.

Compromise involves changing the way you run your business to fit in with global concepts of best practice. This tends to add unnecessary time to core operational processes, leads to product duplication and errors (such as landings or mis-picks), and results in team members finding ways to work around the system, inevitably proliferating the systematic use of spreadsheets with all the risks that introduces. When staff think the system they’re using is getting in the way of their work, they will never use it to its full potential.

One of our clients once described the experience of using standard industry (ERP) software licensed from big tech as “bending software into wine shape”, reflecting the compromises they were forced to make, and the costs and poor productivity that resulted.

When your company opts for an industry-specific software solution, you’re presented with a set of tools that are perfectly adapted to the operating model and associated business processes of your company.

The wine and spirits sector must deal with the idiosyncrasies of inventory management presented by variable stock statuses, physical and virtual product, fragmented storage, variability in supply of goods and delivery. Such complexity needs a data model that is designed for its needs; one that ensures flexibility in management of stock entries.

Introducing a platform that knows wine because it’s underpinned with one of the world’s best referential wine databases and associated rich content (and structured appropriately). That reflects and helps to redefine wine industry best practices. That streamlines processes rather than demands you conform to a generic high-level concept of best practice.

The Wine Hub from Wine Owners excels as a sector-specific platform for managing wine inventories and connected, end-to-end business processes such as purchasing, sales order processing, integrated e-commerce, multi-channel sales management and shipping. That’s our expertise. We believe very strongly in the power of a specialist operating system that helps businesses to buy and sell better, and connecting the operating system to online business services (such as accounting, CRM, business intelligence) that are best in class.