Pernod Ricard is the world’s co-leader in wines and spirits. Since its creation in 1975, Pernod Ricard has undergone steady development, founded on both organic growth and successive acquisitions. Building on its portfolio of Premium brands, its presence on every continent and its decentralized management structure, Pernod Ricard continues to develop internationally. With a strong product based culture and outstanding sales and marketing delivering the best quality to the consumer has never been so important. Case Study: Not only is this quality to consumer top priority for Pernod Ricards’ customers, but for its’ competitors as well. In fact Pernod Ricard produces billions of dollars worth of sprits for many brands they don’t own. Imagine the complexity of forecasting a twenty year old whiskey. First you have to produce it today, age it appropriately, track the quality, and then twenty years from now start to bottle it. Now imagine that evaporation will consume large percentages (up to 80%) of the product, and as the whiskey ages it can be used at any time as another product such as 8 year old, 15 year old or as a blend. The aging process is often staged in different types of containers, so now you also have to manage millions of barrels and other containers. Often like products are consolidated as the barrels empty due to evaporation. In any event, bulk and barrel inventory forecasting and management is the most complicated set of jobs done at any distiller. In fact no ERP application in the world could handle it without extensive modifications. Pernod Ricard used extensive spreadsheets and manual processes to cope with the dynamic nature of this inventory. It required incredible expertise, experience and product knowledge to manage billions in production requirements, shortages, consumption and materials.

When Pernod Ricard approached BIA to help craft a modern solution to this age old inventory management problem, it was with mixed expectations. No one had ever before successfully developed a system to handle all requirements and PR was planning to move to new ERP application in the near future. PR wanted to ensure that whatever they developed was transportable, platform agnostic and browser based. As the analysis unfolded BIA recognized the conceptual problem that had prevented other developers from building a working solution. It was impossible to craft a complete solution using only traditional transactional and procedural techniques. These concepts were the foundation of ERP systems, but the time scale, volume of data and point in time tracking (forwards and backwards) for bulk and barrel management would overwhelm these techniques. The design needed to include a data warehouse base concept, then transaction system on top, then data mines on top of that for dynamic reporting…all in one browser based database/application. BIA was up to the challenge and proceeded to build a function rich, fully integrated, asp.net application with an incredibly flexible back end. By building configurable interfaces the software could easily be adapted to work with any ERP system. Only by combining all these concepts in a single tool could this type of application exist. Over the next five months BIA transformed this radical approach into a truly state of the art application. “Most firms couldn’t grasp the problems, BIA grasped the solution.” Kevin Daniels Applications Manager, Pernod Ricard