Digital Transformation for Top Bordeaux Wine Cooperative with New On-line Customs Declaration Service

Paris, France – June 29, 2018 – Société Cooperative Agricole Univitis, one of the largest cooperatives of the Bordeaux and south west France wine regions producing over 8 million bottles annually, has chosen Genero to boost its organisational efficiency by developing an on-line electronic customs service. Strict French tax regulations require each vineyard to declare every last drop of their monthly production, which until recently, was only possible via a paper system. Recent developments now enable vineyards to declare on-line using a government run Electronic Declaration for Monthly Stock (EDMS) service. Univitis will access this service using xml data transfers.

Christophe Maumont, Univitis

In ‘C’ and Java, you need as many comment lines as code. In Genero the code is practically self-explanatory.

Christophe Maumont,
IT Director,
Société Cooperative Agricole Univitis

Univitis is no newcomer to Genero, having selected it several years ago to develop 5 applications from scratch composed of 700 modules. These applications range from production control, cellar and tank management, sanitary equipment procurement, and point of sales.

Serial Shipping Container Codes developed with Genero Report Writer

Genero Report Writer is used to create EAN128 labels and Serial Shipping Container Codes (SSCC), which attributes a serial number to a palette. These industry specific features, developed in-house, provide International Food Standards (IFS) and British Retail Consortium (BRC) compliance, which enables Univitis to export to the rest of the world.

Genero Report Writer is also used for invoicing, which Christophe claims is one of the most flexible and sophisticated systems he has used. He eagerly awaits the extended Excel export feature announced at WWDC 18, in Paris. Since Report Writer is part and parcel of the whole development environment, it saves him costly license fees he would otherwise have to pay using rival offerings.

Christophe easily keeps pace with user feature requests, which arrive several times a day and consume 70% of his time. Due to the easy nature of the language, he has no feature or bug-fix backlog. He has used other development tools over his 30-year career, but always comes back to Genero.

I like to test other products, it keeps me on my toes. In terms of productivity, there is nothing to beat Genero. I did have a brief excursion with WinDev, and found it great for coding, but challenging for debugging. Code is scattered all over the place and it’s tough to see what’s going on. When I talk with fellow developers, they seem to be rewriting their code every 5 years, which is something I never had to do. They tell me that with some tools they’re doing code reviews with every new release, again something I never felt necessary with Genero.

About Univitis

Univitis is a Bordeaux and south west France wine cooperative with 70 employees that produces over 8 million bottles of wine per year. Half of its production is bottled, of which half is sold overseas, mainly to China, the USA and Europe. The other half of its production is sold in bulk exclusively in France. Univitis produces wine for several prestigious brands.

Driven by values of proximity, equity, solidarity and democracy, the men and women of Univitis have pooled their energy, their talent and their passion for over 30 years to express the best from their land in order to face the challenges of today and tomorrow:

  • preserve the local population, their activity and quality of life in the countryside by ensuring the transmission of know-how between generations and the sustainability of vineyards and farms,
  • balance between tradition and innovation, expose the specific character of their wines from a mosaic of ‘terroirs’ and ‘appellations’, which adapt to market trends, and always create emotion for their consumers.