Stonebridge Vineyards

Expanding Winery Relies on Reftab for Customizable and Mobile Asset Management

Stonebridge Vineyards is located within the beautiful town of Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario, Canada, a region world-renowned for its wine. The winery’s vineyards grow on a 46-acre stretch of land originally formed by melting glaciers. Stonebridge is dedicated to preserving the land, and in doing so, they trust that the soil, sediment and climate will be fully expressed in their wine.

Faik Turkmen, owner of the winery, works with the hope that his two sons will take over from him one day. They started production in 2016 and are growing rapidly. When they started out, they used spreadsheets to hold information. They logged data on multiple barrels of wine, such as barrel contents, racks, bins, ingredients and building locations for storage and cleaning. As they increased capacity they found themselves swamped with an information overload from messy spreadsheets. The need for an easy, yet customizable asset management solution soon became apparent.

Challenge

Faik’s main challenge was monitoring and logging all the various components involved with wine production. They need to track the lifecycle of wine barrels, including their location, their price, the quantity and storage racks. They also need to track the type of wine in a barrel, along with the ingredients. They have barrel accessories, such as bongs, and need to know how many are being used and in which locations. They also need to keep track of generators, air compressors and hoses, and so on.

As farmers and winemakers, Faik and his team are constantly moving around. They are cleaning equipment and tasting wine, all the while making sure to document ingredients and keep things properly labeled. The nature of their business required a proper asset management solution that allowed them to view and update data while they were on the move throughout the day.

Solution

After searching online, Reftab was found to be the solution for them. Faik says, “We were up and running after only a few hours of setup, after making sure it worked for our needs”. What was important to Faik was the ability to scan a wine barrel, view the history of the barrel, log the necessary items and make any needed adjustments all while he was right in front of the item itself.

Reftab was found to be customizable to meet the specific needs of managing a winery inventory. Faik and his team are able to create custom categories and locations that are specific to their needs and make sense to the wine making process.

Results

“Reftab is a major time saver on capturing data and speeds up the process of equipment setup in the field” says Faik. They are reducing the risk of making mistakes that can come from unruly spreadsheets.

Faik also says that his operation feels more professional now because they used to spray paint barrels to label them. Now, however, each barrel of wine has a barcode that when scanned, opens the record. They can then easily display information to wine tasters as well as team members. With the help of Reftab, Stonebridge can stay focused on producing wonderful wines for people to enjoy.