Transformation Stories: Chapel Down

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Our contributors:

Rob Smith

CFO, Chapel Down

Molly Guy

Senior Commercial Analyst, Chapel Down

Josh Donaghay-Spire

Head Winemaker, Chapel Down

Alex Ward

Enterprise Business Applications, Senior Manager, PwC

Winemaking may be an ancient art, but technology is changing the industry from soil to glass.

In this short film, we hear how PwC UK has worked with Chapel Down to transform its business platform, positioning the prestigious winery for growth in parallel with the rocketing appetite for English sparkling wine.

Chapel Down produces some of the most decorated English wines, frequently winning awards over the most famous Champagne houses. We step among its barrels, fermentation tanks and vineyards in Tenterden, Kent to hear about the implementation of an integrated front and back office cloud platform powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 that is driving its ongoing transformation.

Rob Smith, CFO at Chapel Down, who will step down from the business in April 2025 having overseen this transformation project, says the investment in data and technology will support Chapel Down’s growth well into the future.

“We currently turn over just under £20 million a year,” says Smith. “I think this business platform could take us to £200 million a year and beyond.”

This was a collaboration between the teams at PwC and Chapel Down to deliver CRM for sales, ERP for finance, assembly and inventory management, all integrated with Shopify to create a single business platform and data model. For the ERP elements we partnered closely with TVision, an independent software vendor providing beverage industry software and expertise to the Business Central platform.

The resulting commercial agility has transformed the trajectory of the business and informed faster, data-rich decision-making on everything from planting new vineyards to marketing spend and customer and consumer pricing and promotions. It’s a collaborative business transformation that is already bearing fruit.

“We use data every day, from every part of our process, from creating the wine itself, understanding the blends, the grapes through to how it's performing in supermarkets, in bars, on our website, or even how it's selling here in our shop.”

_{Molly Guy

Senior Commercial Analyst, Chapel Down}

Josh Donaghay-Spire
When we walk onto a piece of land for the first time, and you feel the sun, you look at the way that the wind's falling, look at the way that the land slopes, and you think this could be the best vineyard in England. We just don't know it yet.

Molly Guy
Our vision is to change the way the world thinks about English wine.

Rob Smith
English wine has transformed a huge amount, as an industry, as well as Chapel Down as a company, over the last decades.

Molly Guy
We’re stood here in one of our wine barrel store rooms, where our wine is ageing and improving day by day. And that's what we're trying to do here as a business at Chapel Down. We're trying to improve and grow day by day, by investing in our technology as well as our vineyards and our winemaking processes.

Alex Ward
Our main focus of work tends to be transformation programmes. Our role is more than saying, here's a load of activities, this is what we need to complete. Because on that journey, there’s going to be risks that need to be identified. There are rocks that need to be overturned. A solution will only be a good solution if it incorporates the business context.

Josh Donaghay-Spire
So at Chapel Down, we represent about 10% of the English wine industry. We're selling about 1.5 million bottles at the moment.

Rob Smith
Now in the UK we buy about 200 million bottles of sparkling wine a year. So you can see the scale of that opportunity that we can create here.

Alex Ward
Of course, as Chapel Down are looking to scale themselves, they want a solution that is scalable.

Molly Guy
We were in a place where our processes were incredibly manual, incredibly time-consuming. And as the business was growing and scaling, we needed to grow and scale with the business, on the technology side of things.

Alex Ward
There were two parts of this project. The first part was the finance, or the ERP, implementation. So that's Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. That provides Chapel Down with all the data that they need to both run their business, but also report.

Rob Smith
We report daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually both on sales by product but also by channel. And that's quite complex. We can now do that in a very efficient way.

Alex Ward
The second piece was a new sales platform. So D365 for sales. And that's very much around enabling the sales team to manage that end-to-end sales lifecycle.

Rob Smith
The big differentiator for us is the data model and the insight that it gives us, because it allows a company like Chapel Down to understand what's going on in the business, to allow it to make fast, data rich insights which drive much better decisions.

Molly Guy
We use data every day, from every part of our process, from creating the wine itself, understanding the blends, the grapes through to how it's performing in supermarkets, in bars, on our website, or even how it's selling here in our shop.

Rob Smith
One of the biggest decisions we make is in planting new vineyards, and data is absolutely fundamental to that decision. From choosing the location of that vineyard, we look at things like soil types, local climates, through to the financial business case behind it.

Molly Guy
When we invest in planting new vines, we know we're not going to see the return on that for many years to come. But when it comes to our IT systems, we need a fast return.

Alex Ward
We were able to get Business Central implemented in approximately eight months and the CRM in four months. That's a much quicker return on investment for Chapel Down.

Rob Smith
Technology is an incredibly important part of the transformation, but it's only one part of all the different elements that need to come together in a blend to deliver the business outcomes we're after.

Molly Guy
One of the critical factors in the success of this project was the collaboration with the team embedded within our team to really understand how we worked, what we were trying to achieve.

Alex Ward
One of my favourite things about working with Chapel Down is how collaboratively we were working.

Rob Smith
We currently turn over just under £20 million a year. I think this business platform could take us to £200 million a year and beyond.

Josh Donaghay-Spire
I'm really pleased with the wines, I'm really proud of every one of them.

Rob Smith
You do get a lot of pride. When you see someone ordering it in a restaurant, I always ask waiters, waitresses how Chapel Down is selling. I always ask what the feedback is.

Molly Guy
For all of the data that we analyse, the most important point for us as a business is that customers love what we do.