NEW! We've dedicated a larger portion of
our web site to supporting Winery Pro!
View the expanded Winery Pro web site.

• Wine Critics & Reviews
  
  
• Colorado Winery Tour
  
  
• Preparing for New Software Use
  
  
• User Group Report
  
  
• TCA Staff Member Profile
  
  
• Winery Pro™ Features Re-Cap

Colorado Winery Tour

Harvest is near and school will be starting soon. It was my fortune to spend some wonderful hot summer days visiting Colorado wineries near Grand Junction. I was excited to see what a great job the local wineries are doing on the Western Slope - adding to the already exquisite peach orchards with high quality grape growing!

User Group Report

Many thanks again to Rebecca Germolus of Maximum Value Marketing. Rebecca was our guest speaker at the June 2003 User Group and has provided an excellent recap of her marketing tips. Click here to view a printable pdf of her presentation.

Our next meeting will be held Wednesday September 24, 2003 at 7:00 pm at the TCA office in Santa Rosa. Click for directions to the TCA office. Our guest speaker will be Elizabeth Slater, owner of In Short Direct Marketing and the topic will be "Take the Pain Out Of Wine Telemarketing". Learn more about Elizabeth's experience in wine industry marketing.

Winery Pro™ Features Re-Cap

• At A Glance - Customer Profiles and Sales Info, Wine Clubs, Allocations, Critic Reviews and Inventory Balances
• Advanced Data Query To Facilitate Batch Processes
• Futures Sales
• Wine Allocations
• Critic and Review Tracking
• Inventory Stock Levels
• Wine Bottle Technical Info Sheets
• Custom Letter with Merge Fields
• Bulk Email with Merge Fields
• Shipping Grid for Multiple Ship Methods
• Sales Tax Calculated by State and/or County
• POS Entry for use with Mag Readers, Bar Code Scanners and Receipt Printers
• Fully Supported Software System - works in Mac or PC environment equally well

Feature - Wine Critics and Reviews

How does your winery record and follow up on wine samples that are sent to critics and reviewers. Chances are you may be using a traditional spreadsheet system which is not the most efficient system and makes it very difficult to obtain aggregate reporting on the results of those submissions.

Once again Winery Pro facilitates an "at a glance" approach for you to manage submissions. With the Review feature you can:

• Batch process submissions to selected wine critics
• Update inventory decrements for submitted wines
• View all bottles submitted for each product with total submitted and total responses
• Print Submission and Response results by wine critic, product, vintage or varietal

Take the new

News - Preparing for New Software Use

We know your winery staff will be heading into harvest which is an extremely demanding time. Although winery software installation may not be at the top of your list during the harvest period, we want to point out that you can realize substantial financial savings if certain tasks are planned in advance. These tasks should be considered well ahead of your actual software implementation:

• Questions Answered - What do you need to be clear about prior to purchasing a winery management system? Work with our demo CD at a leisurely pace, log your questions and get them answered - don't make assumptions about the functionality of any software system.
• Legacy Data - Begin cleaning your name and address data, check for typos and duplicates - we can import quickly import your existing customers names but the data file should be in the best shape possible.
• Database Manager - Appoint a software administrator, one person who agrees to learn about the software, take responsibility for its maintenance and be able to back up the winery staff in its use.
• Inventory Hardware - Your computer hardware may need an upgrade. Newer computers are faster, more reliable and provide a much higher return on investment for their use - technology has never been cheaper so maximize any new software system with well working equipment
• Plan for Install - Setup your installation date well in advance, create a task list for key personnel involved in the implementation and make sure they are given adequate time to devote to new processes.

TCA Staff Member Profile - Richard Ross

An important component to any great design team is the programming staff. Richard Ross is the Sr. Developer involved with the "build" of Winery Pro. Richard has an extensive background in Macintosh computer systems going back to 1984. He has worked in the realm of system analysis and networking, software training and application troubleshooting. Richard currently serves as an Adjunct Faculty Member for Santa Rosa Junior College teaching FileMaker Pro (beginning and advanced), Excel and Beginning Macintosh. He is the author of "FileMaker Pro - From Fields to Portals" a self-study guide for beginning FileMaker users.

Richard's life apart from computer systems work and teaching is in writing contemporary classical music - jazz, writing poetry and painting. You can view samples of his artwork and music at www.solovey.info

Technology Consulting Alliance © 2001-2003
2841 Cleveland Avenue, Ste. C   Santa Rosa, CA 95403
Phone: (707) 544-1559 | Fax: (707) 544-5090
E-mail: support@tcalliance.com