For the competitive wine and liquor industry, innovation is crucial. As a whole, beer, wine, and spirits are more popular than ever, with consumption of spirits having increased 28 percent between 2000 and 2018. Wine consumption grew 6 percent during that timeframe.
However, if you’re focusing all your development on the quality and distribution of your products, you may be missing a very valuable area for improvement: your back office. Businesses that are able to continually enhance their operations
With the challenges presented by COVID-19, there has never been a more vital time to automate so many back-office operations. From allowing more people to work remotely, reducing costs, and running more efficiently, automation can allow your business to thrive. Here’s what you need to know about automation in the wine and liquor industry.
Automating Administrative Tasks
When you look around at the daily tasks associated with running any winery or distillery, many of them are administrative in nature. You have bills to pay, as well as clients who are paying you. Then there’s payroll, invoicing, and bookkeeping to reconcile it all. These tasks each can require at least one full-time employee, if not more, working 40 hours a week to keep it all going.
In recent years, the wine and liquor industry has increasingly shifted to robotics process automation (RPA) to handle those important administrative tasks. By automating tasks, businesses can take some of the pressure off of employees and create more accurate, efficient procedures.
Keeping Up with Customers
Your sales team works hard to build strong relationships with distributors and retailers. Once they’ve landed a new client, the rest of your team needs to follow up with a customer-friendly experience that keeps them coming back.
With RPA, you can streamline business operations to ensure payments and invoices are submitted and processed in a timely manner. This is an important, but often neglected, part of the customer journey, and if it goes poorly, all the other ways you’ve delivered could be forgotten. In other words, a retailer who loves your product may choose to go with a competitor after three months of invoicing snafus or late payments.
Future Talent Shortages
The skilled labor shortage in the U.S. affects the liquor industry, as well. Even if you have no difficulties recruiting experienced accounts payable clerks and payroll administrators, you may find that hour after hour of manual data entry wears on them.
By investing in RPA, you can position your business for the future, automating time-consuming tasks to let your employees focus on other functions. They can act as approvers, reviewing the work and signing off on things before they go on to the next stage. When they’re invested in the work they’re doing, they’re more likely to stick around rather than taking a position elsewhere.
Centreviews helps businesses across all industries, including wineries, retailers, and hospitality companies. We’ll work with you to determine your unique needs and come up with a solution that fits. Best of all, you can get a no-obligation demo to see if RPA is the right fit for your winery or distillery. Contact us to find out how we can help you make the switch to RPA.
