Robert Mondavi employs Old World methods of making its wines but embraces modern technology in selling them. Three years ago, the company launched an employee intranet and an extranet for distributors. The sites proved so successful that Robert Mondavi decided to launch a second extranet, for trade customers.
Robert Mondavi uses a three-tier distribution system: a sales force sells the company's 22 wine brands through distributors, who sell the wines to trade customers, who ultimately sell wine to consumers. Trade customers include hotels, restaurants, airlines, and wine shops. In the wine business, building ongoing relationships with accounts and providing timely wine information to wine buyers, restaurant managers, waiters, shopkeepers, and staff is essential.
The primary way Robert Mondavi used to provide thousands of trade partners with sales and marketing information was through its sales force and distributors. However, this process was inefficient from both a system and resource perspective because it often involved e-mailing large attachments or sending documents through the mail and did not always allow trade partners to get information immediately.
In developing the new trade partner extranet, Robert Mondavi wanted to take advantage of the information already on its existing intranet and extranet . However, the company wanted to build the new site using new content management technology and then transition the older sites to the same technology.
"The original content management technology we used on our first two sites was cumbersome and time consuming to use, requiring a ton of custom programming work to create and maintain," explains Brian Shelden, IT Director of Robert Mondavi. "Changing the appearance of a screen took two days. Launching a new brand on the Web took three to four weeks. Maintenance using the proprietary scripting language was unbearably time intensive. There was no code reuse. It was a large, fragile, custom environment that took a lot of bodies to maintain."
In addition to Robert Mondavi's intranet and distributor extranet, the company maintains a dozen label-specific consumer sites. Each requires a lot of work to post changes, and content creators at Robert Mondavi weren't happy with the IT bottleneck.
"Internal customers were clamoring for more functionality and more hands-on participation in site revisions and updates," Shelden says. "They rightfully complained that feature additions and changes took too long. Because the IT staff had to develop every change, it really delayed the transfer of information to customers."
Launching a new site using old technology would be like pouring new wine into old bottles, and Robert Mondavi did not want to do that. It was highly motivated to find a new content management environment that would allow it to quickly and easily publish information about its wines and get out of the custom coding business. Robert Mondavi was eager to get a site up and running before the key 2003 fall/holiday selling season, and knew that it would never meet the deadline using its old content management system.
The Robert Mondavi IT staff revisited the portal market to evaluate the latest offerings and found that Microsoft® Windows Server System™ integrated server software—with Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 and SQL Server™ 2000 running on the Windows® 2000 Server operating system—had taken its place alongside leading content management solutions. What they saw impressed them. They saw an integrated solution that promised to reduce the complexity of their current, heterogeneous solution and lower their IT management costs.
Robert Mondavi liked the idea of building on Microsoft .NET software to connect information, people, systems, and devices. "We had previously spent a year building a Java-based application and found the Java architecture to be very complex with lots of moving parts and too much dependence on third-party products," says Shelden. "Microsoft .NET is the exact opposite: It's an integrated environment that's simple to work with yet still has many of the same advanced capabilities as Java, such as the C# language and Web-based applications. The fact that Content Management Server is a Web-based, .NET-based application is huge for us. It's streamlined and straightforward."
Shelden wanted a content management system that would relieve the IT staff of so much involvement in updating websites. "We wanted to completely turn publishing and site maintenance over to content owners," he says. "And we didn't want to expend a huge effort deploying new sites. All our sites are similar, so we wanted an environment that would let us reuse a large percentage of code."
Robert Mondavi brought in Microsoft Corporation and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Allin Consulting to do a proof of concept with Content Management Server and SQL Server, to ensure that the solution would meet the company's needs. After this four-day engagement, Shelden and staff gave Microsoft portal technologies a thumbs-up, and development of the new trade customer extranet began.
Allin Consulting used the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system to design the high-level site architecture and then worked hand in hand with Robert Mondavi staff to build, test, and deploy the extranet. The effort took three full-time people and two part-time people about five months, four of which were spent on design and development and one on testing.
"Microsoft .NET was brand new to Robert Mondavi's IT staff, but the ease of learning .NET and C# was part of the win," explains Karl Kuhnhausen, E-Business Solution Director for Allin Consulting. "Making the transition from one object-oriented language to another was relatively easy."
Robert Mondavi's new trade customer extranet (tradeconnect.robertmondavi.com) allows some 400,000 hotels, restaurants, wine shops, airlines, and other volume buyers of wine to learn about Robert Mondavi wines, read tasting notes and accolades (third-party write-ups), and access a library of bottle and label images. Customers initially sign up for the site, completing a brief profile. On subsequent visits, the site shows each customer only content that is relevant to its business.
For example, customers indicate whether they are on-premise or off-premise companies (indicating where the wine is consumed). Some Robert Mondavi brands are available only to on-premise customers, so soon these visitors will not even see the off-premise brands. Robert Mondavi has plans to develop more audience-specific content catering possibly to restaurants, hotels, or specific geographic regions. (There is no e-commerce component on the site due to strict laws governing wine sales.)
"We really like the concept of templates and placeholders in Content Management Server," says Allin Consulting's Kuhnhausen. "Robert Mondavi had defined four content types in its old content management system, and Content Management Server allowed us to re-create those content types in the new environment. We also like the extensibility of the application programming interface [API]. The site had to look and feel like the two existing sites. With the Microsoft API, we were able to customize and even improve on the old site design."
Initial concerns about site performance were quickly put to rest. "The performance of Content Management Server is phenomenal," Shelden says. "The underlying .NET-based infrastructure yields much of the performance increase, and the tight integration with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 provides the rest. Our distributor extranet, built with the old content management system, also runs on SQL Server and is very similar in design. But performance of the new portal is at least four times better than that of the older one. Great site responsiveness, of course, generates more customer goodwill."
Robert Mondavi uses Microsoft SQL Server 2000 as its content repository. The tight integration between Content Management Server and SQL Server improves performance and simplifies application development and maintenance by allowing developers to take advantage of common Microsoft development tools and skills. "SQL Server is very easy to manage and maintain," Shelden says. "We already had SQL Server experts in-house; it was a natural for this application."
One popular feature of the site is the download manager, which speeds up downloads over dial-up connections. A customer can go through the site, select documents or images to download (point-of-sale materials, labels, bottle shots, and the like), and "click" them into a shopping cart, e commerce style. When the customer is finished, Content Management Server puts all the items in a zipped file and creates a self-extracting executable file that dramatically speeds up download time over a dial-up connection.
The new Robert Mondavi Trade Connect site runs on two servers: a dual-processor Web server that runs the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server operating system and Content Management Server 2002, and a four-way database server (expandable to eight processors) that runs Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000.
These internal servers, accessible by content publishers, are replicated on identical external servers beyond the firewall. Content Management Server extracts changes from the internal systems and replicates them on the external read-only systems accessed by customers.
The new trade customer extranet based on Microsoft portal technologies makes it easier to add and change site features and is easier for developers to maintain, thus providing Robert Mondavi with a far less expensive Web publishing environment. Mainly, the site lightens the support burden on the Robert Mondavi sales force and provides trade customers with 24-hour access to information about Robert Mondavi brands and wines. This increases trade customer knowledge and ultimately yields increased sales.
The new trade partner extranet based on Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 is a breeze to manage compared with the sites created with the old content management system. Making a routine site change has gone from an average of two days to five minutes. Launching a new brand site has gone from two to four weeks to 10 to 15 minutes. And most of those 15 minutes are spent collecting information such as logos, not wrestling with the software.
"One of the features that attracted us to Content Management Server was the ability to build additional sites and features very quickly and efficiently, while still utilizing information stored on our old content management system," Shelden says. "Besides, it would have been prohibitively time intensive or impossible to build some new features—such as a stylized home page, self-administered sign-up, and brand hierarchy—using the old system."
When the IT department does need to change the site, Content Management Server helps to simplify the work. "Everything is so much simpler to deal with, because nothing is custom," Shelden says. "Content Management Server uses standardized functionality and reusable code, so new features or changes are extremely fast to implement. For example, in the Java environment, it took us a good week to put together the code needed to do single sign on. In the Microsoft-based environment, it took five minutes, and three of those minutes were used to read the documentation."
The more straightforward programming environment translates into better use of limited IT resources. "The IT staff can focus on solving new business problems rather than maintaining existing sites," Shelden says. Their first task will be to reengineer the two older sites with Content Management Server, a job that Shelden estimates will take only a couple of months, versus the eight months it originally took to build them. Then his staff can get busy on a new SQL Server analytics project and a harvest management application.
With Content Management Server 2002, Robert Mondavi will be able to maintain 15 websites (2 extranets, an intranet, and 12 public sites) with a head count of just two people. The old system required almost one full-time person per site. This means that Robert Mondavi can redeploy existing staff to new projects and expand its Web presence without hiring more people.
Additional cost savings come from lower maintenance fees. "Annual maintenance on our old content management software was a six-figure sum," Shelden says. "With Microsoft, it's a fraction of that." Robert Mondavi also saves on consulting because Shelden's staff can do more work in the .NET-based environment without outside help.
"In the first year, our new Web portal solution on the Microsoft platform will probably save us $100,000 in reduced maintenance and consulting costs," says Shelden. "The ROI [return on investment] will be 18 months to two years, tops."
Everyone at Robert Mondavi is toasting the move to Microsoft portal technologies. The IT staff is happy because developers are working on a modern, standards-based system that is easy to use. Internal customers are happy because they are more easily able to publish their own information without IT assistance. And Robert Mondavi's trade customers are happy because they get fast answers to questions about Robert Mondavi wines and have fast access to a treasure trove of marketing materials with which to educate their staffs about wines.
Microsoft Windows Server System™ is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows Server™ operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and system management.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/
For more information about Microsoft portal solutions, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/portals
The Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral Windows® component that supports building and running the next generation of applications and Web services.
For more information about the .NET Framework, go to:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/
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http://www.robertmondavi.com
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