Case study: Cline Family Cellars transforms planning with Claret

Cline Family Cellars (Cline) is a family-owned winery in Sonoma County, California, founded in 1982 by Fred Cline. Initially, Cline was primarily focused on Mourvèdre, Zinfandel and Carignane, as well as Rhone-style wines. With the second generation now taking the helm, Cline's focus has broadened to encompass noble grape varieties such as Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Cabernet Sauvignon.

Known for its sustainable farming, Cline is certified for California Sustainable and Sonoma County Sustainable practices. The winery has built a strong reputation for quality and consistency across its Zinfandels, Rhône-style wines, and classic wines like Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. It also offers direct-to-consumer sales through its wine club and tasting room and hosts events and tours at its historic property.

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The challenge

Prior to 2020, Cline relied heavily on spreadsheets for their Sales Planning processes, which, while effective for a time, began to pose challenges as the business expanded. Maintaining a central sales forecast became increasingly complex due to the need to manage multiple versions across various teams.

This approach also introduced hurdles in downstream sales and operations planning (S&OP) processes, as real time updates weren’t always feasible. As a result, determining blend requirements and future crop needs was a tedious and time-consuming task.

Recognizing these inefficiencies, the Cline team took the initiative to find a solution that would provide a centralized platform and a streamlined solution for sales planning. Their team shares, “Our goal was to centralize and enhance the sales planning process, ensuring that we could continue to operate with precision and agility in a rapidly evolving industry.”

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Selecting Claret

They continue, “Cline looked at various options to help with the management of sales and supply planning. Claret was ultimately chosen because of its specific capabilities relating to wine, and its ease of use in updating forecasts.”

During the selection process, the team at Claret provided a trial environment for Cline to use and see the benefits of centralized and end-to-end sales, blend and crop planning within the application. Cline was able to see a sample of their customers, actual products, sales history and existing forecasts and could very quickly run a test case through Claret to build out a future forecast.

This ability to trial the system as part of the procurement process, along with working closely with the Claret team to understand the key features and how to use them, gave Cline comfort in ultimately selecting Claret as the system to meet their needs.

"Claret was ultimately chosen because of its specific capabilities relating to wine, and its ease of use in updating forecasts.” - Cline

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Implementing the solution

Ensuring a successful initial implementation meant involving stakeholders across sales, finance and winemaking. Sales VPs and admin staff, the Director of Finance, and winemakers were all involved in designing the solution and ensuring the master data set up within Claret would work for each area of the business.

Integrations with existing systems were also designed with the team at Claret to ensure data could be pulled into Claret automatically. The Claret team’s extensive experience in integrating with wine and planning systems helped make this a straightforward process.

Implementation did not take long, and involving key stakeholders from various departments ensured strong buy-in across the business.

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Embedding Claret

When it came time to embed Claret within Cline’s wider business environment, Cline's Business Systems Manager, became involved in the project.  From the outset, they could see the benefits Claret would bring to the company. “I was immediately impressed with the ease and organization of the program and how it integrates with our other business system tools.”

Cline, like many Claret clients, began with rolling out Sales Collaboration. The first step was to get the sales team to use the tool for forecasting. The business systems team worked with the divisional sales managers and some regional managers to collect sales data and work to build plans and forecasts. These stakeholders can now all directly access Claret to build and update their forecasts, which means everyone can work with real-time data simultaneously. Cline says “It is easy for the users to toggle between looking at numbers by customer and by item to make clear decisions on the directions of our products.”

Cline and the Claret team then set up Claret to "seamlessly connect to [Cline’s] Andavi suite of programs" and have found the system "easy to use and train on", explains the Cline team.

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Using sales demand to inform winemaking

Cline’s Winemaking team is also seeing the benefits of using Claret. The sales demand managed in the Claret Sell module automatically informs the make plans, which Cline manages within Claret’s Make Planning module. Tom Gendall, Director of Winemaking and Viticulture, can see sales forecasts against planned make volumes and can continuously review the impact on planned release dates for future vintages. Where the current plan results in a surplus or deficit against a given vintage, Claret’s Make module features allow Tom and the winemaking team to work through different scenarios to address this.

As Tom explains, “The tool informs three main planning periods for us. The first being grape contracts in April/May, the second being pre-harvest July/August, and the last being post-harvest/bottling planning in November/December."

During these planning periods and related planning meetings, Cline uses the Gantt view in Make Planning to visualize the releases and quickly highlight any gaps where a surplus or deficit may become an issue. Before Claret, the team would spend multiple days pulling together these charts before each meeting. Now, the charts are live, based on live data, whenever they are needed.

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Moving forward

Cline continues to use Claret throughout multiple areas of the business. Data integrations with other systems mean planning performed in Claret can be informed by live inventory, sales history, and depletion figures, and operations teams can also be kept up-to-date. The next module to be implemented will be Claret’s Crop Supply Planning to allow future crop requirements and positions to also be managed within the system, driven by the demand coming from the “Sell” and “Make” modules.

“Working with Claret as we step into this new era for our family business has been a truly important change for us. Their platform has empowered us to make more informed decisions, allowing us to build on our parent's legacy.”
– Megan Cline

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