Customer stories

E. & J. Gallo Winery imageE. & J. Gallo Winery

Leading family-owned winery builds a foundation for deeper insights into consumer preferences with OpenText™ Extended ECM and OpenText™ Magellan™

E. & J. Gallo Winery image

About E. & J. Gallo Winery

Headquartered in Modesto, CA, E and J Gallo Winery is a leading producer of wine and spirits. The company distributes and markets its brands in more than 100 countries around the world.

  • Founded:
    1933
  • Number of brands:
    100
  • Presence:
    100 countries worldwide

Summary

Challenges

  • E-commerce growth generated large volumes of data.
  • Decision-making insights were difficult to extract.
  • Employees struggled to find information quickly.

Solution

  • OpenText added AI and analytics to Gallo's content management.
  • Magellan Search+ enabled fast federated search.
  • Extended ECM supported workflows and served as the content system of record.

Results

  • Faster, more efficient content retrieval
  • Instant, real-time insights for better decisions
  • Strong foundation, for AI-powered analytics

Challenges

  • E-commerce growth generated large volumes of data
  • Difficult to extract decision-making insights
  • Employees struggled to find information quickly

Founded in 1933, E. & J. Gallo Winery is one of the world's leading producers of wine and spirits, distributing and marketing products in more than 100 countries. With a portfolio of unique wine and spirits brands, the company is the largest family-owned winery in the United States.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the sudden absence of in-person sales sent systemic shocks through the wine trade—and during its early stages, e-commerce became a key channel for E. & J. Gallo Winery. While its e-commerce business worked well, the company knew that long-term growth would require it to improve sales and marketing performance.

Francine Alford, senior manager, marketing systems and solutions group at E. & J. Gallo Winery, explains: “Our e-commerce operations generate large volumes of structured and unstructured data, including online sales, consumer histories, and social media posts about our brands. We captured the information to a mature data lake infrastructure, but extracting actionable insights posed some tough challenges.”

To boost sales, E. & J. Gallo Winery aimed to significantly enhance its analytics and content management capabilities, enabling staff to find and act on information rapidly and easily.

Hrishikesh Panchal, technical product manager at E. & J. Gallo Winery, sets out the company’s goals: “As part of our transformation strategy, we looked for a way to make it easier for employees to find information from any source in the business. We used Magellan Text Mining to interrogate multiple repositories, including Extended ECM as well as solutions like Microsoft SharePoint and Teams.”

Panchal continues: “In the long term, we want to harness AI to empower our teams to gain deeper insights into information in our data lake. For example, performing automated sentiment analysis can help us to detect market trends, which will in turn help us to optimize our product development and marketing processes.”

Our journey with AI is just beginning, but we’re looking forward to working with OpenText to capture customer sentiment insights—helping us to build our brand, inform the development of new products, and grow our business.

Hrishikesh Panchal
Technical Product Manager, E. & J. Gallo Winery

Solution

Working towards new digital capabilities, E. & J. Gallo Winery worked with OpenText Professional Services to augment its content management platform with Magellan—a flexible AI and analytics platform to accelerate data-driven decision-making.

Products deployed

  • OpenText™ Extended ECM

    Improve productivity by bridging process silos and enhancing information flows between solutions

  • OpenText™ Magellan™

    Combine machine learning with data analysis and self-service reporting to maximize the value of business intelligence in unstructured content

Services deployed

Building on a proven platform

E. & J. Gallo Winery is streamlining and enhancing its approach to enterprise content management (ECM). Since 1999, the company has relied on Extended ECM to support every aspect of its operations, including the essential quality management activities that underpin its production processes.

Alford confirms: “OpenText Extended ECM is embedded in a wide range of workflows—from marketing to sales to manufacturing. In addition, Extended ECM is the system of record for any content generated through the research and development lifecycle.”

Streamlining ECM services

Using Magellan Text Mining and Magellan Search+, E. & J. Gallo Winery delivers federated search across Extended ECM and its other systems of record—empowering employees to rapidly find the insights they need.

“We created a custom research and development taxonomy in OpenText Extended ECM, which makes it easy for employees to understand where new documents should be saved,” says Alford. “As well as being much more organized, the new approach offers fine-grained control over permissions based on Microsoft Active Directory groups, which helps to ensure that sensitive data is protected.”

Alford continues: “We’re also working with the team to configure new reports and dashboards for the business, powered by OpenText™ Magellan™ BI & Reporting.”

OpenText Extended ECM is embedded in a wide range of workflows—from marketing to sales to manufacturing.

Francine Alford
Senior Manager, Marketing Systems and Solutions Group, E. & J. Gallo Winery

Results

As it continues its partnership with OpenText, E. & J. Gallo Winery is increasing the maturity of its analytics and reporting capabilities—laying a strong foundation for data-driven decision-making in sales, marketing, and more.

Helping employees find important information rapidly

The addition of federated search is already delivering valuable efficiencies for E. & J. Gallo Winery. Employees can find content faster than ever, enabling them to work more effectively.

“We use a range of different digital systems to create content, and previously employees searched through each system individually to find information,” Panchal continues. “For example, we have an insight team dedicated to business analytics and reporting. Today, employees no longer need to resort to emails or phone calls to try and track down reports from our insight team—everything is right at their fingertips.”

Panchal adds: “Our improved search capabilities aren’t just making life easier for our existing employees—they are also extremely valuable for new hires. Searching for content is much more accessible. Through Magellan Search+, recent joiners and experienced employees alike can find all the information they need.”

Delivering real-time insight to enhance decision-making

The OpenText solution also enables the company to serve up insights using easy-to-consume dashboards—helping to disseminate important information to teams and facilitate collaboration throughout the business.

Panchal says: “We regularly perform consumer surveys, and we now make the latest information from these touchpoints available via a dedicated dashboard. Offering easy access to this information is important for E. & J. Gallo Winery, because it helps our teams build effective marketing and sales campaigns based on deep insight into consumer segments and preferences.”

Laying the foundation for AI-powered analytics

Looking to the future, E. & J. Gallo Winery plans to integrate data insights even more deeply into its business processes. Next, the company plans to leverage social media sentiment analysis to gain a real-time view of brand perception and penetration.

“AI is a very exciting area for our business, and we intend to use OpenText Magellan to automatically process thousands of news and social media posts about E. & J. Gallo Winery to understand how consumers and prospects perceive our brand,” concludes Panchal. “Our journey with AI is just beginning, but we’re looking forward to working with OpenText to capture customer sentiment insights—helping us to build our brand, inform the development of new products and grow our business.”