Serving a key New Zealand export industry, Guala Closures uses Abel® software to provide a complete picture of the business, maintain its leadership in a highly competitive sector and make sure every bottle of wine continues to taste as good as it should.
The next time you open a bottle of wine, the chances are its screwcap, or closure, was made by Guala. This is especially so if the wine is from New Zealand, as the company produces millions of closures for over 250 of our wineries. And no matter how simple closures might look at first, Tomasz Malarczyk, Guala New Zealand’s General Manager, explains that getting them onto all those bottles means managing a supply chain stretching back five months.
Closures are an integral part of a wine’s brand. Once a bottling date is set, timing for their delivery becomes crucial. But first their aluminium has to be manufactured, cut to the specific size, coated, and decorated in other plants around the world before being punched, decorated, knurled and fitted with a special liner at the company’s Auckland factory in Avondale.
As well as efficiency, Guala, as a leader in a very competitive and demanding part of the food industry, is highly focused on process control. In delivering on both it needed an ERP system to give instant visibility across the whole of its’ business and easily adapt to its needs.
“Abel gives us control of the business because everything is controlled with just one tool… If I’m going to a meeting in the South Island or I’m in Europe I can log-on and see a full, most recent report instantly; it doesn’t matter where I am.”
Phased in over two years, Abel is now used to manage every step from ordering aluminium to delivery at the bottler’s door. With data entered directly from the factory floor, it provides within almost a real-time visibility over ordering, production, costs, sales and turn-over. Management is never more than a few clicks from original data, two years ago production schedules could be planned only a few days ahead followed by frequent changes to the plan. But it is a measure of the difference Abel has made in a plant that works 24 hours per day that these schedules are now comfortably set weeks or months in advance.
“Abel gives us control of the business because everything is controlled with just one tool from supply through manufacturing, sales and finally to accounting,” Mr Malarczyk says. He also likes its remote accessibility. “If I’m going to a meeting in the South Island or I’m in Europe I can log-on and see a full, most recent report instantly; it doesn’t matter where I am.”
At each step of extending Abel to cover more of Guala’s activities it has readily adjusted to meet the needs. It has dramatically simplified and cut reporting time. They are now working to achieve full real-time visibility over all processes. Guala is part of an international Italian-based group with over 20 factories worldwide and Abel is now fully capable to automatically present information in a form that meets the group’s international requirements.
Abel is also helping serve customers better. Andrew Twiname, Guala’s Sales and Marketing Manager, says it used to take a day to review production planning and let a customer know if they could squeeze an order in. “But now using Abel I can see instantly if we have the aluminium they need and exactly when our production line will have capacity. This gets the job done much faster for everyone” he says — and helps a key New Zealand export industry continue to grow.