De Bortoli Wines streamline budgeting with Jedox
De Bortoli Wines is a third generation family wine company, established in 1928. The winemaking philosophy is that great wine begins in the vineyard. With vineyards in some of Australia’s best known wine regions including the Yarra, King and Hunter Valleys. The Riverina produces the acclaimed Noble One and world-class premium varietal wines.
Anyone with experience in food and beverage production knows modelling these processes can be complex. From raw materials with expiry dates, to average costs versus standard cost for different parts along the supply chain. Fortunately, De Bortoli have some of the best and brightest working with them: their internal team actually developed a Jedox plug-in for the data integration tool Kettle. In this interview, we speak with Management Accountant Ian McLain, and Solutions Architect, Pieter van der Merwe about streamlining budgeting with Jedox.
Naked Data: Has Jedox made your budgeting easier?
Ian McLain, Management Accountant: Jedox Web has opened up a lot of new avenues. The branches can now enter their data directly and we can see them as they are updated and understand where in the workflow they are up to. Then the branch managers can review their input. It has cut out all that to-ing and fro-ing. The whole process is streamlined.
Pieter van der Merwe, Solutions Architect: Jedox Web has made a big difference. We used to send Excel spreadsheets out to the branches, and then get them back filled in, and then have to import these and make adjustments. But everyone gets access to Jedox Web, so it’s made a huge difference to our data collection and saved a lot of time.
Naked Data: How has your planning process benefited with Jedox?
Ian McLain, Management Accountant: Our pricing model has really benefited. We’re so much more precise now. We’re budgeting and planning by litres, we have a price list, discount and rebate structures based on our customer groups. For budgeting, we used to just take the budget from the year before and add on 3 percent. Now we can work in much more precise measurements, the results are more accurate. We can break down to any level of detail for variance analyses. Instead of trying to figure out whether or not we are under budget, we can see WHY we are or aren’t, we can see whether the discounts are too high, or if the litres produced are too low – or if the cost of goods is too high.
Pieter van der Merwe, Solutions Architect: Finance used to come to us with a general idea of what they wanted and then there would be back and forth as we tried to get an idea of what they wanted, now Finance comes to us with a model and says ‘build this’, and we can model it straight away in Jedox, linking to any operational data sources.
Naked Data: Does this mean you can model business processes more easily with Jedox?
Ian McLain, Management Accountant: Yes. It’s such a free format. For instance, at the moment we are building our own labour model. We used to just budget labour the same way as all the other departments, which did not provide enough detail to allow for meaningful analysis. Now we can extract straight off the payroll package, upload it straight into Jedox, and then have budgets right down to individual staff in the budget model. It’s fantastic for building your budget models on real time issues rather than dumping stuff out of the general ledger.
Naked Data: How quickly do you get to insight with Jedox?
Ian McLain, Management Accountant: Previously we used to update journals in the GL and then we would have to wait overnight for everything to update. We couldn’t get real-time data. That changed with Jedox, we now get info on the fly. When I’m in sales meetings, sales managers ask me if I can incorporate certain things into reports and plans, and I can do it there on the spot.
Naked Data: What next for De Bortoli and Jedox?
Ian McLain, Management Accountant: The writeback is useful for more than just budgeting. We are using this feature to record monthly comments on variances. At the moment we’re doing monthly forecasting as part of the budgeting cycle, but our next priority is rolling forecasting with Jedox.
Snapshot: Jedox budgeting & forecasting solution for beverage producer De Bortoli Wines.Source systems include MFG Pro.
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