De Bortoli Wines Case Study

About De Bortoli Wines

De Bortoli Wines is a third generation family wine company established by Vittorio and Giuseppina De Bortoli in 1928. The couple immigrated to Australia from Northern Italy, and created a winery with a foundation rooted in hard work, generosity of spirit and sharing with family and friends. De Bortoli’s reputation for premium wines, including iconic dessert wine Noble One and the Yarra Valley wines, are world-renowned.

Business Challenge

With nearly 30 brands distributed in over 70 countries, tracking sales, inventory and operations became an increasingly challenging process. Relying upon spreadsheets had become unsustainable both in terms of administrative overhead, and in terms of limitations in reporting capabilities. DeBortoli’s IT department was becoming burdened with issues such as needing to hand code ETL transformations, resulting in reduced efficiency. By developing an optimized data warehouse, De Bortoli could reduce overhead costs and development time. 

De Bortoli also needed to remove their time consuming analytical processing and gain a more complete view of their customers. By blending togther disparate data sources De Bortoli could gain new insights into their brands, products and opperations. Essentially, De Bortoli knew it could improve its bottom line with an optomized data warehouse, but might also be able to gain top-line revenue with improved BI functionality.

Moreover, they wanted to invest in an analytics solution that could grow and scale to their needs without mounting costs. This encompassed a need for tools that can move large volumes of data and for integrating data between disconnected systems, without additional costs.

Pentaho’s Unique Solution

Much like the company’s owners, De Bortoli’s IT department and analysts take a long term view of the world, and were drawn to Pentaho’s open source community and development framework. In 2007, De Bortoli approached BizCubed (the leading ANZ Pentaho partner) who demonstrated one of the earliest versions of Pentaho. De Bortoli recognised the potential for a long term investment and realised, that with help from BizCubed, they could successfully run the community edition of Pentaho Data Integration (also known as “Kettle”). Over the years, they have blended in new data sources to gain a broader view of the customers. De Bortoli continues to rely on the services and expertise of BizCubed to support and optimise their use of Pentaho business analytic tools to provide their end-users more business value.

• Pentaho Data Integration used to extract, transform and load data from various operational, financial, and sales databases
• Pentaho OLAP Analytics, Business Reporting and Ad Hoc Report Writer employed to provide cross departmental Analytics and reporting for business users (all accessible on both Linux and Windows clients via web browsers).
• Pentaho partner BizCubed provide training, services and consulting to enable effective use of Pentaho.

Value Added 

With the Pentaho subscription model and flexible, local support from BizCubed, De Bortoli could run their Reporting, Analytics, and Data Integration without licensing complications. BizCubed further helped De Bortoli evolve their analytics strategy to better understand how BI fits within data warehouse development. This ensured that the various types of data that De Bortoli stored would “play well together,” and would allow them to tap the broadest possibilities of their analytics future. De Bortoli’s analysts began combining new sources of data, which improved their sales and marketing segmentation strategy.

Additionally, with new customer insights they could more effectively assess their market strengths and weaknesses to refine their brand, operations and pricing strategy. The sophisticated new tools provide data-driven insights, and with the combination of fast execution, ease of use, and browser based accessibility, a self-service analytics culture was promoted within their company.

With Pentaho and BizCubed’s training, support, and services, De Bortoli has the gained a comprehensive view of their customers and built a modern, scalable data warehouse. Pentaho’s Data Integration tool (“PDI”) has become the glue that holds their data ecosystems together. As well as doing the BI heavy lifting through loading De Bortoli’s data warehouse, PDI is their tool of choice when integrating legacy and modern systems. Thus, they can manage their legacy systems without losing sight of organisational goals or end-user needs such as tracking global KPIs on a granular, brand level. They have gained analytical insight and developed strategies not only focused on next quarter alone, but rather the next quarter century, positioning them as industry leaders and innovators.

Through De Bortoli’s long-term commitment to Pentaho and BizCubed, they have not only learned a great deal of what is possible with Pentaho Business Analytics, but also served as teachers and developers, helping shape the product and tools seen in the open source community.