Visibility should be an Asset, not a hassle...

Imagine for a second that you’re the largest winemaker in Oregon.

You’ve been producing high-quality wines at affordable prices for two decades, and consumers trust your brand to make delicious, sustainably grown products consistently. You need to have visibility into all elements of the winemaking process, right down to the grapevines being planted in the vineyard fields.

This is the case for A to Z Wineworks, located in Newberg, Oregon.

A to Z Wineworks sources grapes grown at over a dozen vineyards. They need a large amount of data to ensure that they make the best wine possible. Insights into the people operating in these vineyards, the conditions of the land and weather, and the quality of the products themselves are at the core of their data.

Visibility into the people, places, and products involved in their growing operations is essential for maintaining a high-quality product.

Unfortunately, maintaining and sharing all the data necessary for a large-scale agricultural operation is challenging. Various types of data are needed from different stakeholders to see the whole picture clearly. Pivotal pieces of information live in an assortment of digital and analog formats, and in some cases, they may not be recorded at all.

This makes all this data aggregation and analysis unnecessarily time-consuming, frustrating, and expensive for the winemakers.

The Provenance Chain Network (PCN) serves as a system of evidence to capture, organize, and share data insights about business operations to permissioned stakeholders.

Using the PCN, A to Z’s vineyard managers can easily record claims and evidence about their growing operations to a shared digital record right from their mobile phones.

This means that all members of the winemaking process, right down to the employees walking through the vineyard blocks, can share what they see, creating greater visibility. Observations include critical milestones throughout the growing season that affect harvest, issues that need to be resolved, or data points that will help inform future seasons’ efforts.

Data is stored in an immutable fashion on the network that can be analyzed and shared with business partners.

Even external data sources can be utilized to provide greater visibility.

The PCN has created a widget application to automatically collect and organize weather data.

Devin Weeks, Assistant Viticulturist for A to Z Wineworks, shared that he can spend 80 plus hours manually collecting data about weather conditions throughout the growing season. This data helps A to Z predict the timing of their operations but consumes much of their focus during their 7-month growing season.

Using the PCN widget to notify vineyard staff of significant events in advance saves time and money. A to Z’s employees will spend less time tediously inputting data and more time doing what they love: growing fantastic wines. Joey Myers, Head Viticulturist for A to Z Wineworks, said that working with new technologies like PCN is the key to businesses expanding their operations without sacrificing their integrity or employee wellbeing.

Visibility is key to producing a great product, but it shouldn’t be a hassle. Maintaining a shared system of evidence allows A to Z Wineworks to capture and share critical data about the wine-growing operations more efficiently.

Removing the headache of tedious data collection will enable them to focus their attention on continuing to produce the fantastic Oregon wines we all love.