The Winemakers’ Federation of Australia has initiated a world-first performance monitoring system for Australian cellar doors in response to industry demand for accurate and up-to-date wine tourism performance data.
Known as Cellar Door METRICS, the interactive web based program was built by Morton Blacketer Pty Ltd with support from the Australian Government’s Industry Partnership program, Tourism Australia and state tourism organisations.
In today’s competitive wine market, wine tourism is an increasingly important route to market for wine producers. However, with more than 1500 cellar doors nation wide, this sector is highly competitive, so wine companies need to determine how they can maximise their return on investment.
“The Winemakers’ Federation aims to maximise returns to Australian wineries through both our advocacy role in influencing government policies and also through the development of innovative programs such as Cellar Door METRICS,” WFA chief executive Stephen Strachan said.
In addition to collating much needed industry statistics on this vital component of the wine industry for planning purposes, the program will provide real time analytics that allows individual cellar doors to benchmark themselves against competitors and key tourism data.
Key information that the system will provide includes conversion rates (visitors to sales), visitor spend by category, average sales by category and regional, state and national comparisons.
“Cellar door operators often ask whether it’s worth expanding their product range to include merchandise or food sales, what percentage of sales these should represent and just what are effective staffing ratios,” Mr Strachan explained.
“However, without hard data, the answers are merely anecdotal and wineries simply use the trial and error approach. Provided we get a significant uptake by industry, such statistics will be available for the first time.
“This data can also help the industry in highlighting our value to government. We know the industry employs a high number of casuals due to seasonal fluctuations and the need for weekend trading hours, however we currently have no hard data on the labour mix and how this affects local economies and individual cellar doors.”
Tourism organisations will also have the ability to upload regional event data into the system, which will enable analysis of the impact such events have on visitor dispersal and spend.
The user friendly system has been designed to minimise the time required to input data and retrieve timely reports. Cellar door operators can download data forms to record their daily data, then simply log on at the end of each week and input the information. The system will even send a friendly reminder to registered users each week.
Confidentiality was also a key consideration in building the system, while still allowing meaningful statistical data to be collated in a report format.
“Individual winery information is completely confidential and can only be viewed by the registered user. Aggregated data is used to produce comparative reports, which will calculate automatically once there are a minimum number of registered users per category,” Mr Strachan said.
“A critical factor in the success of Cellar Door METRICS will be the number of wineries that register and use the system. Registering is just the first step. For the reports to provide the maximum benefit, it is imperative that there are significant numbers of cellar doors in each region entering data each week.
“This is an indispensable, critical cellar door management tool that will empower wineries to achieve better resource management, sales and profitability.”
A number of wineries have already committed to the Cellar Door METRICS program and are enthusiastic about its potential to benefit their business and returns across the industry, including Hannah Logan of Logan Wines at Mudgee and Bruce Tyrrell of Tyrrell’s Wines.
“Cellar door is an important part of our distribution channel. It’s an opportunity to deal directly with customers and get instant feedback on our products. As profit margins are greater through this channel, it’s an important piece of the pie,” Ms Logan explained.
“We want to increase cellar door sales by 100% in the next 12 months and are constantly looking for ways to help achieve this goal. We registered on the Cellar Door METRICS website straight away. There’s nothing else out there quite like this. I will be able to benchmark my cellar door against others in my region and in NSW. It’s also a good tool for reporting history of our own sales. The website is easy to use and it’s not a big commitment in terms of loading sales data to get the reports.”
Bruce Tyrrell summarised the aims quite simply: “This program is all about improving cellar door performance – by providing reliable comparative and benchmarking data which is better than anywhere else in the world.”
WFA has invested in the initial infrastructure costs with the support of the Australian Government’s Industry Partnership Programme, administered through the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry.
The initial pilot program will run for 12 months until 31 December 2007 at the special introductory rate of $150 per winery, which has been heavily subsidised by the State Tourism Organisations.
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