Helping Winery Streamline Talent Management Strategy with Cloud Solutions

The Overview:

Napa-based agricultural client partnered with CKG to digitize and streamline their winery seasonal talent management strategy and solutions.

The Opportunity:

Napa Valley, a world renowned region of wine producers, is heavily reliant on seasonal workers for nearly 99% of its agricultural production. Handpicking of grapes is a key differentiator of wine quality, harvest health, and the overall winemaking process. With harvest season spanning August through October each cycle, the agricultural workforce in the region fluctuates throughout the year and grows to more than double during peak season.

Our client, an agricultural labor outsourcing firm, struggled to scale talent management and payroll activities effectively due to a combination of workforce fluctuation needs, decentralized processes, and technology limitations.

The Approach:

We partnered with our client in evaluating and categorizing their key pain points to drive solutions across three categories: Technology, Operations, and People.

Technology

While business increased year over year, talent management paperwork took a life of its own, requiring manual intervention to complete human resources activities, payroll compliance, and client demands. Faced with multiple file formats and lacking adequate interfaces, weekly payroll cycles encompassed five-to-six business days in advance of bank cutoff deadlines - over 60% longer than industry averages.

As such, we conducted a vendor search and selection exercise and implemented a cloud solution that provides scalability, compatibility with customers' systems, and digitized end-to-end human capital management operations.

Operations

Driven by the hourly basis of farmworkers pay schedules, individual timesheets were received on a weekly basis and transmitted in decentralized formats. Outsourcing clients automated individual timesheets' email delivery from their respective payroll systems, increasing complexity for our client's manual operating model.

By implementing a customizable payroll solution, we were able to digitize the intake of most timesheet templates and automate reconciliation of data for payroll and accounting purposes. We also delivered value for our client's customers by enabling integrations to deliver employee information without manual intervention.

People

Influenced by technological and operational limitations, our client's payroll and human resources teams had doubled in size in recent years to accomodate for increasing manual tasks and employee management activities. Because our client's strategic goal was to limit layoffs to as close to zero as possible, we expanded our operational efficiency analysis to broader business functions. Through this exercise, we identified opportunities for upskilling and reassignment of resources that would otherwise be downsized.

The Impact:

By the end of our engagement, our client had streamlined more than 50% of administrative tasks and decreased payroll processing by over 60%. This enabled our client to not only meet the industry standard for processing times but also to re-allocate resources to growth-enabling initiatives instead. These operational improvements resulted in stronger relationships with stakeholders by enhancing the employee and customer experience, improving time to market, and increasing scalability to meet demand.