Complexity has been called the “silent killer” of growth, crippling organizational effectiveness as companies expand into new geographies and lines of business. Just ask Jackson Family Wines, the leading family-owned collection of estate vineyards and wineries. Since planting its first vine in 1974, the company has grown to include 40 individual wineries—and finance was no longer able to manage budgeting and reporting with their existing system. What’s more, its FP&A staff required assistance from IT consultants, and the winery was struggling to manage its increasing workforce.
Today, thanks to Workday Adaptive Planning, the finance and executive teams now have the data and insights they need to plan ahead 10 years out. And because Workday Adaptive Planning is so easy to use, employees across the organization can participate in the planning process, including staff who manage seasonal headcount changes.
Understanding potentially what is going to sell two and three years out drives what we're going to plant (in the vineyard) or what we're going to contract for today. Workday Adaptive Planning, with the ERP integration and insight into our distributors’ depletions, allows us to look at the future a little closer.
Chief Financial Officer
Challenges.
Keeping pace with rapid growth. As the family wine company grew, legacy planning systems became untenable, and spreadsheets couldn’t scale with the growing number of brands, business units, and SKUs.
Existing system was difficult to use. Non-finance users couldn’t get the data they needed to produce accurate, effective reports because the existing solution was too complex.
- Ineffective workforce planning. With a workforce heavily comprised of hourly employees in both production and retail, managing headcount and overtime projections was a challenge.
Results.
- Managing complexity with ease. With a single source of truth across 40 wineries, Jackson Family Wines can now manage finances across multiple business units and brands with data that is current and accurate.
- Company-wide user adoption. Workday Adaptive Planning is so easy to use that the FP&A team can do the majority of the system management. Users across the company now have timely access to fresh, real-time data that informs more accurate forecasts and scenario planning, better decisions in the field, and channel distribution.
- Efficient workforce planning. Today, the ability to anticipate rapidly shifting labor changes due to harvest and production cycles and consumer demand is simple. Business unit managers can easily update hourly-based employees on a monthly basis, and identify and split costs between employees in multiple business units.