The digital twin has arrived, even in industries that are not normally associated with high-tech tools — like wine making.
Producing a fine wine takes craftmanship and experience. These days, though, having the right technology and data at hand can help too. One producer that has gone digital is Germany’s Markgräflich Badisches Weinhaus, a joint venture between traditional winemaker Haus Baden and Rotkäppchen-Mumm, Germany’s largest producer of sparkling wines.
The two are bringing innovative software to the art of wine making to redefine wine-growing in the region and tell consumers more about how each wine was produced.
More and more midsize companies are following the trend and are now adopting the latest technology to stay competitive. In 2017, four out five companies in Germany’s Mittelstand used software that runs in the cloud. And one in five midsize companies deployed enterprise resource planning (ERP) software from the cloud.
But what matters is that data exchange is fast among different software solutions. Markgräflich Badisches Weinhaus is one midsize company whose business is benefiting from cloud solutions. Using specially adapted software, it applies the latest technology to wine making.
Until now, the two companies in the joint venture each had its own separate ERP systems. To work as one, though, they needed a solution they could both use.
The ERP system the Markgraf von Baden winery had been using could not connect with Rotkäppchen-Mumm’s SAP Business Suite and would not have met the latest regulatory requirements, introduced at the start of the year.
The answer was vineaByD, an SAP-approved solution package built by SAP partner sine qua non and based on SAP Business ByDesign. It can be implemented rapidly and is tailored to the specific needs of the wine industry. The standardized features in SAP Business ByDesign means it dovetails with Rotkäppchen-Mumm’s software.
Now the IT systems of the two joint venture partners are fully connected, both parties can access all the data they require and still act autonomously when they need to. This project also shows how the latest technologies enable joint ventures to work together but also act independently.
“New technologies don’t just benefit individual businesses. When companies team up, both partners benefit from the capabilities of today’s business software,” says Rainer Zinow, senior vice president of Product Management for SAP Business One and SAP Business ByDesign. “Our partners know how best to adapt SAP solutions to the needs of their customers so that the software is the right fit for their businesses.”