Arterra Wines reduces manual processes with Fluent Order Management

The organization

Arterra Wines Canada is headquartered in Ontario, Canada with origins dating back to the late 1800s. Over the years, the company has grown and evolved to owning and distributing 100+ wine brands including Ruffino, Kim Crawford and Inniskillin.

They operate eight wineries and over 1,700 acres of premium vineyards in Canada’s wine regions. They also own and operate over 150+ Wine Rack retail wine stores in Ontario. In addition, they sell wine kits and products for winemaking through its RJS Craft Winemaking brand.

The challenge

Within the last 2 years, we’ve been going through our digital transformation at Arterra Wines. The big part being, how do we become a leader in the ecomm space for the wine industry.

Johnny Ip, Digital Acquisition and Growth Manager, Arterra Wines

That meant closing the gap between what was available in their stores and what stock was available online. The Arterra Wines team needed better visibility into the inventory they had for each brand across all their warehouse and store locations. They were feeling the pains of rapid growth, on top of launching new initiatives like their wine club subscription offering.

Another roadblock? Too many manual processes. “Our KPIs were about reducing manual effort” noted Johnny. Hours were being spent on manual entry and tasks, such as entering shipping information and printing labels. This led to some undesirable outcomes for both customers and employees. Customers saw long order processing times, which created a negative customer experience. And the employee experience was suffering, including an overextended customer service team.

In addition, they needed full control over their fulfillment logic. Alcoholic beverage distribution is complex. There are rules around what products can be shipped across province borders.

The Arterra Wines team was looking for an Order Management System (OMS) that could provide the following benefits:

• Real-time inventory data
• Easily manage safety stock to avoid overselling and canceled orders
• Ability to reserve items in customers’ cart while they continue to shop
• Handle complex fulfillment rules
• Provide store managers with a view of what stage an order is in

How could Arterra Wines scale up and solve these issues to become a leader in the ecommerce space within the wine industry? A modern tech stack. Johnny and the Arterra Wines team shared that they needed to know, “How do we solve for bridging the gap for order management across our different online and offline channels?”

The solution

Fluent Order Management stood out amongst the rest, providing the business with the following benefits:

• Flexible platform and cloud-native scalability
• Ability to utilize and set safety stock as needed
• Display real-time inventory data across all locations and systems
• Automate manual processes
• Singular view of orders across all users in the business, from in-store employees to customer service
• Ability to easily integrate with other systems

The rollout

Arterra Wines chose an MVP approach. They started with Global Inventory and Ship from Store. Along with implementation partner, Valtech, and Optimizely — a digital experience platform — the Arterra team shared that they “had a really successful launch and deployment” of Fluent Order Management.

As Arterra continues their growth trajectory, the next phase of MVP is implementing Buy Online Pickup In-Store (BOPIS) with Fluent Order Management across multiple locations and banners.

Results

Fluent being customizable and the fact that it can integrate to other systems has been a big win. We’ve been able to develop all the functionality we need with Valtech & Fluent. Plus, with full confidence in its ability to address scale.

Johnny Ip, Senior Digital Acquisition & Growth Manager, Arterra Wines

The company has already seen some big wins:

• 50-75% reduction in order processing time
• Over two-thirds reduction in customer service inquiries
• Year-over-year increase in order volume
• Increase in process time for Wine Rack
• Central view of orders within the fulfillment lifecycle

One of the biggest wins? Automating manual processes. Fluent Order Management has allowed for the team to save hours on manual tasks. And the employee experience has been significantly improved, from in-store staff to the customer service team.

As we scale out to more people and more teams, having one central view is so important for the ability to be transparent.

Johnny Ip, Senior Digital Acquisition & Growth Manager, Arterra Wines

In my entire career working with digital experience platforms, I have never seen an organization come further in their digital maturity than the Arterra team. The efficiencies that the new tech stack has allowed both the technology and marketing teams to achieve has been transformational to the organization. What started as a simple replatforming has turned into a multi year transformation project that is fundamentally changing the way Arterra is doing business.

Matt Vandermolen, VP, Portfolio Lead, Commerce and Composable, Valtech

Future focused

Arterra Wines has their sights set on more success in the near future. They plan to launch more sites, migrate more banners and grow their fulfillment network. And importantly, the addition of Buy Online Pickup In Store (BOPIS) across their banners is a key project the team is focused on.

Fluent is helping us build where we want to go for our ecommerce and omnichannel journey.

Johnny Ip, Senior Digital Acquisition & Growth Manager, Arterra Wines