Technologies which are crucial for the Wine Industry

With the Franschhoek Uncorked Festival happening this weekend, we thought it may be interesting to our readers to find out a little more about how a company in the wine industry (such as Graham Beck) makes use of technology, what different Line of Business applications are out there, as well as new technologies which may be more cost effective when implemented correctly.

Instead of writing out a long drawn out case study (which I admit I would not be able to write very well), I have decided to keep this article in a short interview fashion… here is what Jacques Wilkinson our Tier 3 senior technical specialist had to say about how wineries make use of technology, and discusses a project that he recently finished at one of our clients Graham Beck Enterprises (of which Graham Beck Wines is part of the group and who will also be part of the Franschhoek Uncorked Festival).

NK: In what way does a company in the wine industry make use of technology?

JW: The most critical time for the wine industry is during harvest time, during harvest they absolutely need to have their Line of Business application running because all input and output goes through their system, so they cannot afford to be down for one minute.
We have just finished off a project at Graham Beck Wines who have recently merged with Steenberg Vineyards in Tokai  to fall under the Graham Beck Enterprises umbrella. One aspect of the project was to give them a central place to access their Line of Business applications being ‘EZY’, which we were able to do by means of dedicated wireless connections with the assistance of local ISP Adept Internet Services.
Many of our clients in the wine industry in the Western Cape are also currently using EZY as their Line of Business application.

NK: With technology not being 100% reliable, what are some of the ways which we could alleviate the problem of their Line of Business application from going down?

JW: We have managed to steer around the problem of these systems going down by virtualising these ‘EZY’ servers and making daily duplicates of these systems as well as employing a rigid backup strategy. By doing this we will be able to fall back to the last ‘virtual copies’ and with the tape backups, we can restore data easily.

NK: Does this save time?

JW: Back in the day you had to reinstall the server or backups which can take a long time, as you can imagine. We have cut down recovery time from 16 hours (doing it the old way) to having the ‘EZY’ server up and running within an hour.

NK: What are the benefits of doing this?

JW: Production can go ahead, and in a company like this every minute you are down you are potentially losing a great deal of money!
So by doing things this way has definitely been of benefit to Graham Beck Enterprises.

NK: Are there any new technologies that may be of benefit to other companies in the wine industry?

JW: The major change we were faced with was firstly the EZY systems and the second was for Graham Beck Enterprise to have the ability to print whether they were sitting in Franschhoek, Tokai or at their Robertson offices.

Another constraint was the inherent incompatibility of legacy printers with any new systems that would be implemented as the legacy printers had very set ways of connecting back to EZY and how it functioned.

With an application called ThinPrint we were able to get around these incompatibility issues.
The major benefit to wineries is that they can now get away with not having to replace potentially 20 printers on their site(s) to get working with a new server.

Natalie Kowalik