Australia loves its whisky, and there aren’t many places better suited to crafting an exceptional dram than Tasmania. In fact, it was a Tasmanian distillery that made waves in 2014, when a cask won the world’s best single malt at the World Whiskies Award – and broke apart the longstanding Scottish and Japanese whisky supremacy.
Crafting some of the world’s best whiskies takes more than just the best waters, ideal climatic conditions and a passion for quality. As LARK Distillery knows well, you have to master the systems to produce exceptional draughts time and again.
LARK Distillery began in 1992, when their founder, Bill Lark, was fishing with his father-in-law, Max. Bill said, “Why isn’t anyone making single malt whisky down here in Tasmania? We’ve got the water, we’ve got the barley, we’ve got clean air. We’ve got the peat. Why doesn’t anyone do it?” Together with wife Lyn Lark, they set out to change history.
From a kitchen bench in 1992, LARK Distillery has grown to a multi-million-dollar whisky business that’s also proudly shaped the Australian spirits industry. Over the last 30 years, LARK has seen some incredible changes and growth – which has also meant that their systems and solutions have needed to evolve too.
Like many businesses, LARK Distillery had been operating with software systems that were once fine for the job – but their operations had outgrown the old-school interface and limited capabilities.
Just ask Ben Wiedman. He’s the right kind of person to be working behind the scenes at LARK Distillery. With experience as a distiller, in projects and planning, and in business intelligence, Ben’s well suited to be Head of Technology and Information at LARK – and to oversee the transition from LARK’s old ERP systems to the new cloud-based Cin7 Core Inventory.
As Ben explains, growing revenue, and the need to mature the systems as the company matured, posed a challenge for LARK Distillery.
“Functionally, our old system did what it needed to,” says Ben. “The interface was very old school; it was MS-DOS style, almost. Battleship gray was very prominent. But we needed a system that had better integration with our finance, ecommerce, asset tracking, and business intelligence systems.”
“We needed to replace this old legacy system with something that was more fit for purpose,” Ben says. And that would allow LARK Distillery to continue to make waves in Australian whisky.
That’s where Cin7 Core – and implementers Waypoint – came in.
LARK Distillery takes grain, yeast and water, and through the power of fermentation, turns that into an alcohol ‘wash’. Once that’s been distilled twice, it produces a raw product that can then be casked, matured, disgorged and bottled.
“When we talk about bottling it, it’s the bottles, it’s the labels, boxes, shippers, barcodes, corks, everything. Then there’s ecommerce and sales. Across all that you’ve got your costs: material costs, labor costs. If you need to go do something to a particular cask, for example, that comes through as a service cost. That’s essentially the high-level flow of what we do. And we need to track everything from the grain to the store.”
There are countless ERP solutions on the market today, but LARK had specific goals in mind: they needed a solution that was suitable for a small- to medium-sized company like theirs, and that would afford that tracking ability with ease and remove any blocks to creating a world-class drop. Also, they needed to know that they could deploy the resources needed for a changeover, and that there was a partner that could support the execution and have them running quickly.
LARK chose DEAR Systems – now called Cin7 Core – an app that makes enterprise-level inventory management, manufacturing, sales integration, reporting, and automation accessible to all businesses. But Cin7 Core is also incredibly powerful.
As Ben explains, “Cin7 Core has a lot of capability but we know that we don’t need to turn all that on, or execute all that straight up. So we asked: “What’s our base functionality that we need and does that cover where we’re at?”
It was at this point that Waypoint were brought in to help manage the changeover and implementation so that LARK could achieve the system they wanted – and not get bogged down with tools that they had no need for.
“There’s always been a requirement to track and manage everything from ingredients to stock. Being able to capture that in Cin7 Core makes that much easier to report on.”
Cin7 Core means that LARK can see precisely what’s going into each stage of the process, managing that process becomes much easier. Cin7 Core is an ‘assembly’ style solution, meaning it can track exactly how much of each ingredient, and how much time and labor go into each bottle. That means better reporting, better transparency, and better business decisions too.
“For us, Cin7 Core saves us time. It means we have a true single source of truth. We’ve got real time updates of understanding where things are at. We now have a view anywhere of what our inventory is doing. That enables better business activities to happen.”
“We’ve reduced single point dependencies, and the reporting system allows people to do their own kind of analysis – or at least get an understanding of what they’re looking at in the system without having to ask for help.”
“Waypoint helped us achieve something great,” says Ben. “We had an easy working relationship, and they made sure we had a really warm handover to ongoing support once we’d gone live. They’ve been really proactive about making sure that we’ve had the capabilities we wanted, well into the aftercare time.
“If you want a new ERP, then talk to other industry peers – especially those who had taken on Cin7 Core – and find out what’s worked for them. Make sure it’s going to help you not just understand what you’re doing as a business, but also that you’re going to meet your obligations at tax time too. Then find a partner like Waypoint who will be there for you throughout the process. They were excellent.”
For LARK Distillery, this modern solution will see them continue to lead Australian whisky well into the future. Having already used Cin7 Core ERP for over a year, they are now taking on their next project – implementing the full Production module for Cin7 Core. This will give them schedule and resource capacity control over all of their machinery, bottling plants and warehouses.
“It’s not just about having a modern system that we can use and has better integrations,” Ben says. “We also now have a solution that’s much more accessible to more people. We can get more from our ERP, get more people across any task, and make better business decisions.”
Owner, Waypoint
Head of Technology and Information,
LARK Distillery
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