Heuristic winery scheduler

Problem:

While new wine brands continually flood a crowded market, a new marketing concept in wine packaging / scheduling could make a huge difference in brand awareness and consumer take away, providing a mechanism for consumers to remember the wine they enjoyed and even find it later at retail

Presentation is the key. When customers open a packed box they feel they are opening a present.

Innovative Packaging Ignites 50% Sales growth. It has become an entrenched part of the wine industry. Boxed and Tetra Pak wines , bottles with screw caps appeal to a wide spectrum of the premium wine drinking market.

However, traditional wine packaging presents so many opportunities for error with wrongly documented product codes, incompatible product selection, missed delivery targets, communication failures and many more. Also, wineries simply didn’t have the tools to make timely decisions required to keep every bottling event on schedule.

Hence there was a need to design an automated winery packaging and scheduling software involving science, art and technology of bottling, enclosing or protecting products in the best medium for distribution, storage, presentation of goods for sale, and consumption.

Solution:

Sveltoz then mechanized visual user friendly wine packaging software to help wineries get the preeminent wine packaging and scheduling.

The application allows an event manager to set up events to schedule, design and package bottle runs.

Every event includes selection Wine Maker specs - Vintage model, wine type and anticipated volume of wine and can have several bottle runs associated to it.

Every bottle run comprises of:

• Wine bottle details – Bottle appearance, label design, casks. Images of the bottles and labels could be uploaded or selected from a pre defined option list.
• Packaging pattern and designs – Helps the user specify placement of the bottles (no. of rows and columns) into cases/cartons.
• Closure details – Cork / Screw cap closures.
• Pallet selection for the wine rack.

Every event is audited and could be archived. A system admin then approves the event. Post approval the bottle runs are scheduled for packaging.

Key Business impact:

• The suggestive feature of best combination of bottles closures and cartons helped build the confidence in the wineries, good selection and packaging.
• The winery scheduling events were imbruted in a regulatory, timely, flawless manner.
• The packaging effectiveness experienced a radical increase in packaging schedule and delivery timelines.
• The communication between the customers winery bottling event requirements, the contract bottling and dry good supplier experienced a remarkable perk up.
• The online solution helped wineries to build and visualize their wine packaging elements on screen.
• The Carton packaging offered consumers excellent value, easy portability and storage.

Key Implementation Challenges:

• Implementation of label design on bottle with precision of height width and 360* view of bottle.
• Computational logics to package bottle with precision of height, width of bottle and cork, empty space, filling material.
• Implementation of live event feature to show complete overview in one look.
• Document handling.
• Status and schedule of delivery.

Key success factors:

• The software served as a tool to make judicious decisions required to have accurate bottling event.
• The packaging facade enhanced the product protection, functionality, quality and aesthetic appeal thus contributing to the commercial success of the product/brand.
• A real time communication channel (via SMS / email) was established between all the stakeholders in the packaging/scheduling event in case of desired / critical amendments.
• The visual competence of the software granted the wineries to view the end result instantaneously.
• The software provided an extensive range of preferences to choose the cork, label designs, wraps, casks, packaging patterns/ designs.

Technologies used:

• Microsoft .Net Framework 4.0
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012
• C#.net, Bootstrap, Ajax, Asp.Net MVC3