According to Sante Magazine, 45% of wine companies surveyed have experienced staff shortages in recent years, and over one-third say they’ve had to abandon growth opportunities as a result. While the brunt of it is typically felt in the vineyards, where it has become increasingly difficult to find seasonal workers skilled in the art of grape harvesting, the labor shortage also affects the back office.
How can winemakers increase their business efficiency without becoming overly reliant on new hires, which may be in short supply?
The answer lies in choosing the right winery management software. With an ERP platform that automates tedious-yet-necessary tasks and leverages the Cloud to make up-to-date business data available anytime and anywhere, your winery can ease the day-to-day burden on your current employees—and attract new ones in a competitive labor market.
There isn’t much that any given company can do about broad market forces—but each company does have some measure of control over employee retention. By making sure your current employees stick around, you can avoid digging a hole that you may not be able to refill in a timely fashion.
According to a survey by staffing company Robert Half, 46% of professionals say they’re looking for a new role. While most of those respondents say they’re mainly looking for a salary boost, there are many other common factors, including feeling overworked, not having sufficient work/life balance, and boredom. Those are all things that can be at least partially addressed by upgrading technology.
If your winery has a small accounting staff, and they have to manually run reports on different varietals and vintages, you may be risking losing some of them to burnout. A wine-specific ERP solution like VinPoint Wine Management can track important data and create useful reports automatically, freeing up your back-office employees for more engaging projects and, yes, allowing them to go home at a reasonable time.
Imagine an accountant with a strong resume and a genuine interest in working in the wine industry. They’ve applied for a role at your winery, but also at a couple others. Everything else being equal, which winery do you think they’ll choose to work for: the one that uses modern, wine-specific accounting software? Or the one running generic software so that wine-related functions are done in a spreadsheet? Or the one that’s still rolling on a rickety old system that tends to create a lot of busy work?
Just about anyone who’s ever worked in an office has at least one horror story about a piece of software they had to use that either required a lot of tiresome manual inputs or simply didn’t work. If you can pitch prospective employees on a powerful platform that performs the most tedious tasks for them, that’s a big point in your favor. But if you have to mumble something about working in giant, cluttered Excel spreadsheets, well… you’ll have to hope things like compensation and company culture are enough to make up for it. After all, nobody wants to start a new job already bracing for a big pain in the neck.
If you simply can’t find or land any strong candidates at the moment, you’ll need to make things work with the people you’ve got. In addition to improving and automating key processes (such as issuing invoices), an ERP solution like VinPoint can help your winery:
When your wine management software is powerful, well-designed, and easy to use, you can quickly boost your overall operations without having to make a new hire. It’s a major upgrade that you can make now, without waiting for the labor market to break your way.
With VinPoint, you don’t just get good software—you get a partner in Enavate with a track record of helping wineries get the most out of their technological investments. Beyond implementation, our team can help you make work easier for your current staff and more appealing to future hires, improving your company’s capabilities in the process. If that sounds like something your winery could benefit from in the face of an uncertain labor market, reach out to us today.