Optimising Workforce Management for Virgin Wines through custom Microsoft Power Apps

THE CHALLENGE

Over the past 25 years, Virgin Wines — a leading online wine retailer — has delivered more than 100 million bottles of quality wines to customers across the UK.

With its headquarters in Norwich and distribution centres nationwide, the company focuses on providing high-quality wines, while optimising product fulfilment and logistics to ensure next working day delivery. It operates at scale; processing 650,000 orders and shipping over 10 million bottles each year.

To manage fulfilment efficiently, the company relied on a Warehouse Management System (WMS) for product data and a Time & Attendance (T&A) system for workforce management. However, these systems operated in silos and lacked integrated reporting to effectively forecast resource demands. This made it difficult to align workforce allocation with operational needs.

The management team needed a solution that could track time and attendance while also functioning as a task management tool — allowing them to collect accurate workforce data, improve resource forecasting, and enhance operational efficiency.

THE APPROACH

After realising that a turnkey solution would involve significant integration costs, the company approached Climber to assess what other options were available.

We spent time looking at the data available and the challenges they were facing in their order fulfilment process. The company were impressed by how we communicated with the group and quickly understood the root cause of their challenges.

“They were not asking complex questions… they were asking real world, how do you do this in the warehouse day to day? It really was a no-nonsense solution… a very productive and engaging workshop group, which delivered a low cost of TCO as well.”

Danny Cooper, Chief Information and Digital Officer

We recommended developing a bespoke Microsoft Power App solution, aligned with Qlik Sense analytics.

Not only would this option meet the company’s exact needs, it would save over £180,000 in initial costs and could be deployed in just four weeks.

We worked closely with the Virgin Wines in-house team to develop and deploy the solution. This ensured that they had all the knowledge they needed to manage the solution themselves going forward.

THE RESULT

The Virgin Wines Power App provides the company with an intuitive touchscreen interface to tracking workforce time and comprehensive resource reporting for improved planning. It also seamlessly integrates with the existing WMS for better forecasting.

By implementing the Virgin Wines Power App, the company now has real-time visibility into workforce activities, significantly improving their ability to forecast and allocate resources effectively.

“We had absolute confidence in the technical competence that was being offered to us, again, because we have a relationship with Climber. We know the guys, and we know what they’re capable of doing.”

“It was bespoke to our needs. A very quick delivery turnaround… four weeks is an impressive turnaround for anything, to be honest.”

Danny Cooper, Chief Information and Digital Officer