Yalumba

Yalumba is a family-owned, South Australian based mid-sized wine production and distribution company that has been operating since 1849. Yalumba’s diversified business includes primary production, vine nurseries, winemaking, bottling and distribution of their manufactured and third-party wine through wholesale and retail sales. They are a large importer and exporter of wines as well as operating vineyards and wineries in Australia and New Zealand.

Phil Armstrong, General Manager, Finance and Administration at Yalumba described their previous budgeting process as “diversified, detailed and pragmatic” at the time. Each geographic or fu nctional unit had their own customisation’s – some ‘top-down’, some predominately ‘bottom up’ – in their budget preparation process. Hyperion Planning was their main software, used as a foundational tool to manage their sales and expense budgeting. Filemaker Pro was used for their production budgets. Excel spreadsheets were also used to help with consolidation, payroll and multiple support documentation.

“We found Adaptive Planning to be logical, flexible and could be owned by the commercial part of our business (not our IT section) – consequently, user acceptance has been high and rapid.”

Phil Armstrong, General Manager, Finance and Administration, Yalumba Wines

Phil emphasized the heavy time consumption and constant correction of errors, using their previous solution. However, with a substantial amount of manual effort and user knowledge, Yalumba managed to get it working.

Yalumba assessed upgrading their current Hyperion software and 2 new software vendors – Adaptive Insights and IBM Cognos TM1.

“Adaptive was chosen as it had the right functional fit, a logical structure, ease-of-use, cloud-based and the lowest total cost of ownership,” stated Phil. “We were after a software package capable of initially consolidating and simplifying our planning process, and then providing agile ‘what if’ type analysis.”

Subsequently, Yalumba decided to purchase the Adaptive Planning module. GKH was chosen as implementation partners due to their commercial knowledge in addition to their extensive product knowledge. Phil and the rest of his team at Yalumba felt very comfortable that GKH understood their requirements.

Yalumba’s implementation team consisted of two senior accountants from within the business and one consultant from GKH. The consultant from GKH was Martin Kudlik, who has had over 15 years’ experience in delivering these system projects.

Due to Yalumba’s diversified processes and the desire to change to a more brand/channel based planning system, Martin had spent more time during the implementation and re-designing to Yalumba’s internal requirements. In this regard, Martin and GKH’s commercial experience proved invaluable.

Yalumba’s implementation schedule was 6 weeks which included personnel, sales and expenses, as well as the above-mentioned re-design of internal processes.