“T5 Digital worked with us to truly understand our end goal, something that has been highly beneficial to me and my wider team. In the fast-moving world of retail, flexibility is what really delivers results and T5 exemplify this.”
Founded in 1890, J. García Carrión is Europe’s largest winery. A highly successful business, the company produces and supplies quality wines, cava, fruit juice and dairy alternatives for consumption across the world. As a Spanish company with headquarters in Madrid, it relies on its regional centres to oversee the import and distribution of these products for local markets.
In the UK, J. García Carrión has a turnover of over £150 million, supplying all the major supermarkets and leading discounters, with wine and juice arriving from Spain for distribution in line with supply and demand. To manage this effectively requires not just the physical products flowing through what are termed consolidators, but also up-to-date and accurate data on, for example, current stock levels, expected deliveries and required orders.
This data is vital to providing the business intelligence to ensure the products arrive at the retailers, and ultimately consumers, in the right quantities and at the right time.
“T5 worked really well with me to understand what I wanted to achieve and to bring out the solution from that. Their flexibility to adapt to the means we have at present and to deliver from that I really appreciated, and I think really sets them apart”.
Recognising that all the information was available to the team but arriving at different times from a range of sources and in multiple formats, T5 worked to incrementally put in place a solution that intercepts the data as it arrives, processing this through an API layer into AWS S3 cloud data storage. From there AWS lambdas are used to clean and structure the data into a consistent format that can then be easily queried through AWS Athena, a simple to use data analytics platform.
Focusing on the needs of the existing team, and mindful of not introducing another new tech solution to learn, clear reports are then generated with data relating to key business questions such as stock levels and daily orders. These are automatically emailed to them ready for the start of each UK business day.
An added benefit of the incremental and pragmatic approach is that it has built trust with head office. The UK were able to quickly show return on investment (ROI) for the project and the partnership with T5, demonstrating how the solution had immediately saved the team over five hours of manual data processing time each week. And building on this, that this time and effort could be reinvested onto more valuable activities to help the continued growth of the business.
In addition, the reports are now available seven days a week and two hours earlier than prior to automation. This has unlocked both significant reductions in the time taken to supply the reports to wider parts of the business, and improved reliability of both data quality and access. The UK team is able to quickly respond to key questions from retailers as they arise, building the responsiveness and reputation of J. García Carrión.
With this value already delivered, the next stage is focused on enhancing the “one-stop shop” portal that will allow Paul and the team to unlock further value from the data, answering more complex queries from retailers in a reduced timeframe. One potential extra goal is to be able to pre-emptively determine the potential impact of things such as weather events or other major issues and take action to mitigate, something that wasn’t previously possible.
It’s also set the scene for a potential wider roll out of the solution across the J. García Carrión organisation. With the value of an adaptive and incremental approach to unlocking business insight from the data established, there is a good foundation from which to collaborate with central IT in Spain and other regions.
Throughout the partnership, the J. García Carrión UK team and T5 have demonstrated how a clear focus on understanding the business goals with a flexible and pragmatic approach to technology can deliver real results quickly.
All of this was achieved without requiring huge upfront costs, overly complex systems or extensive organisational change. The collaborative approach has built the foundations for continued evolution and wider adoption of the system, supporting the on-going success of the J. García Carrión business.
