An inter-organizational interface for ERP-systems and marketplaces in the wine industry

Abstract

The life-cycle of a new wine year in Austria begins shortly after grape harvesting. A large part of the working steps in the vineyards are supported by technical device. In these early steps of work not much data has to be gathered. Only after the start of grape harvesting much information about the wines e.g. quantity and gradation has to be recorded. After harvesting the wine has to mature and to be tasted now and then to eliminate potential wine faults. During the process of maturing a huge amount of data arises. In the end, bottling is the last step in the wine production cycle. All of these steps are supported by ERP solutions for wineries and the information can easily be stored and accessed within them. After the production cycle the important process of marketing and sales begins. Sales processes in the wine industry can be either classical via retail stores or via e-commerce processes. They need on the one hand many information from production processes such as quantity, alcohol or residual sugar. On the other hand there also arise much new information such as quantity of bottles, sales data and many more. Although the ERP systems support some parts of sales processes they leak in data communication with other sales systems. Data gathered in those has to be maintained manually. Administrative data can also be forwarded to governmental departments online but the data exchange between ERP system and e-government tool happens manually this present day. For that reason the task of this Master Thesis is to develop a communication interface called WineDataXchng Interface for wine data. Because of complex and versatile data structures for storing wine information we divide the analysis of the Austrian wine market into three subparts: Survey on computer supported viticulture, analysis of cellar management applications and a web fitness analysis. The knowledge of these analyses are aggregated while developing the interface and a working prototype.