A winery where the crush ran on whoever could keep up with the inbox
Built an intake assistant that reads incoming grower email at harvest, sorts and files every attachment to the right lot on its own, and tracks which loads are still missing paperwork so the cellar team stops carrying it in their heads.
For a few weeks at crush, the work doubles and the inbox is where it lands. Growers and haulers send lab sheets, weigh tickets, and delivery notes by email, often as a stack of PDFs across several messages, and someone has to read each one, work out which lot it belongs to, and file it before the fruit can be received. During the peak a lead was spending two to three hours a day just on that, the single thing that interrupted the day more than the phone.
The other half was the chase. Plenty of loads arrive with a piece still missing, and you cannot close out a lot until it is all there. The firm tracked the gaps by hand, a person had to keep remembering who still owed what, and at the busiest moment of the year that memory was the only thing standing between an open lot and a clean record.
We kept the people in control and took the sorting off their plate. Incoming grower mail is read as it arrives: the assistant pulls the attachments, recognizes a lab sheet from a weigh ticket from a delivery note, matches each one to the right lot, and files it, so the documents land where they belong without anyone dragging them there.
On top of that sits the part the team asked for first, the missing-piece tracker. Every lot shows what it still needs at a glance, and the follow-up to the grower for the outstanding document goes out on its own, drafted and ready, with the person deciding when to send rather than having to remember it exists. One screen shows the status of every load, so nothing depends on a single person holding the season together in their head.
The two to three hours a day that disappeared into reading and filing email at peak dropped to well under an hour. The same lead handles the crush without it taking over the day, and the work that is left is the judgment, confirming a match and approving a chase, not the manual sorting.
The missing-paperwork problem stopped being something a person had to hold. The gaps are visible on one screen, the reminders go out without anyone tracking them by hand, and a lot closes when it is actually complete instead of when someone happens to notice it is not. Through the busiest weeks the team kept pace without adding a seasonal hire.
“At crush, email was the bottleneck. Two, three hours a day just reading attachments and working out where they go, and on top of that remembering who still owed us a sheet. We wanted that off our heads without losing the control.”
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