Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/437909
56 Wines&Vines January 2015 CATEGOry your work and the lessons learned. Each year you should start off where you stopped last year. The company wants grapegrowers and winemakers to have easy-to-un- derstand analyses that ensure the steps taken lead to higher crop quality and profitability. Growing grapes in today's cli- mate is increasingly complex and challenging. Premiere software brings state-of-the-art viticultural techniques and materials to ad- dress issues such as berry set, vine health and cluster. They claim to help growers achieve crop unifor- mity, maintain soil fertility, irriga- tion levels and management of grape quality. The software pro- vider has developed custom plans to reduce farming costs, improve grape quality and improve com- munications and relations with wineries or other grape custom- ers. Using their planning and de- cision-making capabilities should allow you to manage your vine- yards more cost effectively. crop data management In this section of software for vine- yards, the vendors are larger com- panies appealing to larger-sized businesses that need data across a larger array of crop types so that they can have a uniform platform to manage and make decisions. You can tell a company like Cyret has its eye on the larger corporate clients when the software they are selling informs the customer that growers, packers, shippers and processors are using enterprise management techniques, and the software on which they base their product is produced by Oracle. Similarly CDMS, Mapshots and Neal Carter Associates also focus on large companies that service all types of agriculture, only one of which is the vineyard. It is hard to tell the extent to which vineyard- specific software is more or less detailed than this software, be- cause the feature set that they ad- vertise is roughly the same. It most likely has to do with the ability of the software to handle a larger va- riety of discrete tasks, and then the difficulty of integrating it all into one master program so the larger and more diverse companies can have one platform to manage all of their agricultural businesses. Integrated WIne Industry softWare Two companies, IVS Software and AMS Winery Software Integrated Winery Information Systems, have fully integrated software packages that can take you from land pur- chase to delivering a finished bottle of wine to the customer and every- thing in between. Due to the com- plexity of the integration and the multiple business types in the wine and grape industry, it is not surpris- ing that the more integrated the software, the more expensive it can become. For that reason, AMS soft- ware only sells the vineyard pack- age to wineries that are already large and complex. iViS software The IVIS is a set of integrated func- tions developed specifically with and for winegrowers and wine- makers. In general, the functions are designed for ease of use, flex- ibility and navigation through the site. The goal is to capture, main- tain and analyze process informa- tion in a way that enhances the probability of delivering high qual- ity grapes to the winery. Their ap- proach is to ease data-entry effort and apply the data to multiple purposes. A few of the highlights of features for vineyards include: • Produces detailed grower weight reports, optionally including quality and extra effort (sorting) details. • Produces payroll summary by worker, vineyard, do- main, etc. • Vineyard work tracked at any level (block, sub-block, rows, individual vines— any combination) • Vineyard treatments auto- matically calculated by acreage. Vineyard and winery work is diverse, and staff is kept small. This creates a situation where it is highly likely much of the informa- tion available is not captured. The IVIS software attempts to retain