Review

Vineyard & Winery Management
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	Wine Production Management
	PC-Blend
	OenoLog
	Breckenridge Winery Management Software
	The Winemakers Database
	Wine Production System (WiPS)
	Other Software for Wineries
	The Virtual Winery
	Logix Winery Control System
	How to choose Wine Production Management Software

Author Information:
Marne Coggan is a teacher, a software quality engineer, and a Sonoma County vineyard owner. Email him at marne@svn.net

Most wineries are started to express a love of and a passion for making wine. Unfortunately, much of what winemakers and winery owners must do has nothing to do with the art and love of wine, and everything to do with record-keeping, government compliance, and managing costs. But happily, software packages designed specifically for wineries can provide an easy and helpful way to handle those essential but non-romantic tasks.

This article will focus primarily on wine production management software, with reviews of five production management systems created specifically for wineries. But we'll also take a brief look at two other software systems of interest to wineries, one which produces production and financial forecasts for winery operations and another which controls automated winemaking processes.

(Note - due to length, only the review of the VIRTUAL Winery is shown here, to review the entire artical click the link below :

http://www.vwm-online.com/Magazine/Archive/2001/Vol27_No1/Software.htm#8

Other Software for Wineries

Wine production management software is not the only type of software useful for wineries. For example, some software packages manage a winery's entire sales process or are specifically designed for tasting room retail sales. These categories of winery software will be discussed in future articles. But we will describe two other useful types of winery software here. The first is software designed to help a winery plan its financial futures and get the resources-especially financing-necessary to grow and flourish. The second is software to automate and control wine production processes in larger wineries.

The Virtual Winery

The Virtual Winery is a production and financial forecasting system for winery operations. The system runs on desktop PCs with Microsoft Office 97/2000 installed. It creates a detailed, ten-year forecast of a winery's financial position and resource requirements.

Says C.P.A. Allan London, the creator of The Virtual Winery, "Winery owners sometimes have difficulty understanding the concept behind the software until they have a sudden and unanticipated need for money, grapes or bulk wine. Generally, selling wine in this market is not the problem-it's finding the resources to produce it. And, it is impossible to accurately determine the resource requirements for increasing production without the use of vintage calendars and a cost rollup that The Virtual Winery provides. As far as I know, there is no other product that solves the problem of long term planning for winery operations."

The software produces balance sheets and statements of operations, cash flow, marketing and administrative expenses, production costs, inventory movements and production statistics and footnote disclosures. It forecasts tons harvested and crushed, grapes and bulk requirements (depending on your formulation entered), gallons in production, cases bottled and barrel requirements for both new and used barrels for up to 10 years. The software consolidates production costs, sales and inventory movements and production statistics for an unlimited number of products, while producing balance sheets and operating budgets. The system includes a version control system for managing forecast scenarios and an extensive and elegant system for budgeting and allocating expenses during the forecast period. There is also the capability to integrate estimated head counts by department and employee classification and capital budgets into the forecast.

London says, "The Virtual Winery will tell you what financial and material resources will be required if you, say, want to increase your production from 12,000 to 30,000 cases. The purpose of the software is to give winery owners a clear vision of what their goals are and how those goals will be achieved – sort of a road map for the future.”

The system produces over 60 pages of extremely detailed production and financial forecasts. These reports are used by banks to establish commercial lines of credit, and are very useful to managers, financial partners and investors to assess the current and future state of the business.

The Virtual Winery sells for $1,000 for the forty product version. The price includes up to six hours of training and implementation support. A fully-functional demo of the program and manuals are available for download at the Virtual Business System, LLC web site (alondon.com ). However, the demo is limited to only four products. Notes London, "A Virtual Winery database (or version) zips down to about 250K, so it's easy to collaborate and move versions back and forth between multiple computers located, say, at the winery, your home, or your accountant's office."