Unified data accelerates growth

Since its inception in 1995, WineWorks has played a pivotal role in supporting the New Zealand wine industry by providing essential bottling infrastructure and services. For more than 29 years, the company has expanded alongside its winery clients, ensuring ample capacity for bottling, labelling, storage, and distribution—all specialised processes that demand expert handling.

Since its inception in 1995, WineWorks has played a pivotal role in supporting the
New Zealand wine industry by providing essential bottling infrastructure and services.

For more than 29 years, the company has expanded alongside its winery clients,
ensuring ample capacity for bottling, labelling, storage, and distribution—all specialised processes that demand expert handling and world-class quality standards.

WineWorks operates at a massive scale, bottling up to 65,000 cases a day across nine bottling lines in three plants. Each wine bottle must not only be pristinely produced, but it must also meet numerous compliance standards such as the Brand Reputation through Compliance Global Standard (BRCGS). As such, vast amounts of data are constantly generated throughout the bottling process to meet client and
compliance needs.

However, this wealth of data was stored across various data platforms, leading to
inefficiencies that affected business areas such as the planning of pricing strategies and delayed error reporting from the bottling line. Fundamentally, the absence of a unified data approach was impacting WineWorks’ ability to optimise its operations.

Ernie Scherf, Group IT Manager at WineWorks, explains the predicament, “We had so much data and it was in quite disparate systems. We had numerous data procedures and we had to deal with truckloads of business intelligence reports. Still, there were chunks of missing data.

“We wanted to bring together the data in a coherent way so we could better predict how long a bottling run would take and increase our efficiency.”

Recognising the need for a more integrated approach, WineWorks sought help from Fujitsu to develop a unified data platform to streamline data processing and enhance decision-making.

Scherf says, “I was a little worried initially as we had not worked with the big data
companies before.” However, he was assured that Fujitsu has worked with companies of different sizes and would provide a bespoke solution tailored to WineWorks’ needs and timeframe.

A Fujitsu senior solutions consultant started with a comprehensive assessment of
the existing data management practices to identify gaps and designed a long-term
roadmap for integration.

Then over six weeks, the Fujitsu consultant worked closely with the WineWorks IT team to help them design an end-to-end data infrastructure that would address their needs. The collaboration phase ensured the new system was tailored to WineWorks’ unique requirements and seamlessly integrated with their existing processes.

The data architecture they settled on consisted primarily of a lakehouse model built
on Databricks and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms. The lakehouse approach combines the flexibility and cost-efficiency of data lakes for raw data storage with the structured data management and SQL querying capabilities of traditional data warehouses. This hybrid model allows WineWorks to store all its data in open formats, while still enabling high-performance analytics and business intelligence workloads.

Fujitsu also helped WineWorks implement key tools such as Databricks Unity
Catalog, a governance tool for managing data and AI assets securely and efficiently.
Unity Catalog provides centralised governance features that simplify the security
and management of data across various workspaces and cloud platforms.

With the foundations of the new infrastructure in place, WineWorks could now
begin automating the workflows for raw data collection and data transformation to
processed data. User access to the system was also made secure and simpler with
single sign-on implementation.

With a consolidated data platform, the company can now begin to collect and analyse data more ef ficiently, supporting better decision-making and strengthening the quality of its service.

“When we complete the integration process in the coming months, we expect to be
able to automate more of the bottling process,” says Scherf. Real-time data monitoring and automation will minimise downtime and improve production accuracy, potentially reducing costs and enhancing output quality.

“For example, when a bottling line stops running, we will be able to get real-time
notifications instead of having somebody go down to the bottling line to find out
what went wrong,” says Scherf. “This will free up our staf f to focus more on the
quality component of their job, such as making sure the bottles are labelled and
capped properly.”

Scherf originally had a seven-year plan to automate WineWorks’ bottling lines and
integrate them into a ‘smart factory’. The partnership with Fujitsu has accelerated
this timeline significantly.

“Instead of seven years, we will now have a majority of the components of my plan in place in the next few months,” he says.

Beyond the technological advancements, Scherf felt that working with Fujitsu has
benefited WineWorks in a much deeper way.

On Fujitsu’s commitment to knowledge transfer, Scherf says, “The Fujitsu sales and
solutions teams made sure that our IT team learned as much as they could from them. Fujitsu’s desire to help build up our team capabilities through collaborative training and consultation proved to be a game changer for us.

“Fujitsu did a very good job of explaining the why and the how of what we needed to do, teaching us the industry’s best practices in the process. I am also truly impressed with how our IT team has grown and gained the confidence to use this technology with the help of Fujitsu."

With the lakehouse data platform, WineWorks is well set up to realise its plan of
becoming a ‘smart factory’.