Founded in 1963, Joval Wine Group (Joval) is a family owned business specialising in fine wine distribution. Joval have been involved in every area of the wine industry, from grape growing, wine production, distribution and retail.
Joval recently undertook a digital transformation project, transitioning to the cloud with Microsoft Azure. As part of that project, Fujitsu was engaged by Microsoft to showcase how Joval could benefit from AI.
Data Science is rapidly transforming how businesses operate, creating new products and services, opening new markets and increasing profitability. The challenge is where to start the journey to build capability and generate commercial value. Joval wanted to understand how it could use Data Science to deliver commercial value now, and into the future.
Challenge
Joval Wine Group wanted to understand how it could use Data Science to deliver commercial value now, and into the future, after undertaking a digital transformation project and transitioning to the cloud with Microsoft Azure.
Solution
Fujitsu Data & AI were engaged by Microsoft to showcase to Joval the benefits of AI. This was done through the ‘Data Science Data Hack’ solution: a 20-day exercise engaging stakeholders across the business.
Outcomes
- Identified six business use cases with associated business value.
- Based on value, selected sales forecasting to build the data science model.
- Built a working sales forecasting data science model on 10 key product lines.
- Provided a clear path to productionise model.
The Fujitsu Data & AI team challenged our thinking and brought to the table a range of data science opportunities relevant to our business.
Andrew Stoneham, CTO at Joval Group


Using data science for improved sales performance
Joval benefited from our proven ‘Data Science Data Hack’ fixed price solution. Over 20 days Fujitsu engaged senior executives, business analysts and technology specialists to identify real commercial opportunities which could be developed using data science. An opportunity was identified and a proof of concept for Sales Forecasting was developed.
As a result of the proof of concept, Joval have been able to identify how moving forward with this AI project could deliver tangible benefits to the business such as:
- Improved sales forecasting to increase sales performance
- Ability to forecast in detail by channel and state
- Reduce shrinkage
- Improve sales conversion through faster stock availability and personalised customer experiences
“Joval had an excellent data hack with Fujitsu. The Fujitsu Data & AI team challenged our thinking and brought to the table a range of data science opportunities relevant to our business. We quickly identified sales forecasting as the opportunity with the greatest business value and the team were able to quickly develop an effective prototype, leveraging the suite of Microsoft cloud solutions. We see a big opportunity to improve our working capital by leveraging AI and Machine Learning to optimise our inventory levels. The prototype we developed with Fujitsu Data & AI using Azure Machine Learning has shown real promise and we hope to pursue this further post COVID.”
- Andrew Stoneham, CTO at Joval Group.