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RPA Advantages For The Largest Exporter of California Wines

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E. & J. Gallo Winery is a winery and distributor headquartered in Modesto, California. Founded in 1933, E.&J. Gallo Winery is the largest family-owned winery in the United States. E. & J. Gallo’s RPA project has been underway since January 2020. Let’s learn about this automation in detail.

CHALLENGE
Massive platforms like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are a great example since they can leave big gaps in functionality after they’re up and running. E. & J. Gallo ran into the same problem. Its ERP solution provided more visibility and synchronization than ever before, but it came at the cost of increased data management requirements. The platform is only as good as the data supporting it, and it takes a lot of time and energy to continually feed large ERP systems with the information they need. On top of that, there’s always the risk that someone will put in the wrong data, which can lead to department heads and team leaders making decisions based on faulty information. Looking to streamline data entry and management tasks while also ensuring the complete accuracy of those activities, E. & J. Gallo decided to test the RPA technology.

SOLUTION
No surprise, that Finance and Accounting are some of the most natural starting points for any RPA journey due to the sheer number of repeatable processes that could be easily automated. For RPA leaders like Robert Barrios, E. & J. Gallo’s VP of IT, the first order of business was to create a proof of concept to showcase RPA and get organizational buy-in. Once it had that compelling proof of concept with finance automation, the team quickly expanded RPA into other corners of the business, using software robots to pay compensation to distribution partners and transfer data from Excel spreadsheets to the company’s SAP system.

TESTIMONIALS

“We’re using RPA to help enter master data faster. We’re doing two things: data quality checks as well as have RPA handle input of new product versions into SAP. If you don’t RPA that, it takes an army to enter a new version. We want employees to contribute their work hours to value. We’ve used RPA to take the mundane work out of their day so they can help on more advanced projects.”

Robert Barrios, Information Technology VP, E. & J. Gallo

BENEFITS

  • 10,000 Hours saved since January 2020
  • 500,000 Dollars saved in RPA-driven cost avoidance

FUTURE
The company plans to significantly expand its Center of Excellence — tripling its size — over the coming months. In addition to great wine, E. & J. Gallo serves up a perfect example of how to get an RPA project off the ground and then nurture it by steadily building up support from across the organization.