The global wine industry experienced tremendous disruption in 2020 that will continue to impact the wine supply chain, including production, in the U.S. and most every major wine producing region worldwide for the near- to medium-term. The Coronavirus pandemic, historic and damaging fires throughout California, and widespread closures of restaurants, bars and wineries that dramatically affected on-premise wine consumption will have lasting effects moving into 2021 and perhaps beyond. Sporadic shutdowns of wine operations, while easing, are an example of the disruption that has emerged as the “new normal” for the industry while it adapts to a new future. Now is the time to review your operation restart readiness with this 13-point checklist that helps reduce risk across critical operational areas.
Each of the 13 topics is followed by specific items that provide more in-depth guidance related to that topic. Please note that some items on these detailed checklists may not be relevant to your particular operation. Some topics address restarting after a partial shutdown, while others apply more to a total operational stoppage.
If your organization already has a restart checklist, you may want to cross-reference it with this checklist to ensure all key topics are addressed.
Utilize your organization’s existing management systems and their processes as you consider each of these operational restart topics (Quality, based on ISO 9001; BRC Food Safety, Occupational Health & Safety, based on ISO 45001; and Environmental, based on ISO 14001).
Beyond using this 13-point checklist to evaluate and address potential risk areas related to the restart of your operations, this checklist can also demonstrate to your customers and other interested parties how your organization is managing the restart of your business operations. Additionally, it would be prudent to use this 13-point checklist with your suppliers.
The 13-Point Checklist
#1 Contingency Plans
- Review/update production and product safety plans
- Start-up checklist, (is one available, does it need updating?)
- Current contingency plans
- Applicability of existing contingency plans to current circumstances
- Develop missing contingency plans
- Process for capturing immediate lessons learned
- Immediate updates to Emergency Action Plan
#2 Inventory
- Physical and digital inventory of finished goods, materials, components, and ingredients
- Shelf-life sensitive items
- Storage conditions maintained; increased storage cleaning schedule
- Review product traceability
- Ensure labeling and pack control
- Review status of nonconforming product awaiting disposition, reprocessing, etc.
- Review and recount plants in field to recalculate expected grape production
- Review tanks and barrels in cellars
- Refill barrels and check status
- Recount bottles in lockers to reassign reserved and/or pre-order boxes
- Wine Production Year: choose the destination year and policy that will define the production and bottling
- Count of labels and corks for different countries and regions
#3 Immediate Customer Delivery Requirements
- Communicate with customers
- Open customer orders
- Backlog orders
- Cancel old orders
- Near-term customer delivery schedule
- Monitor schedule variances daily
- Status of open customer complaints, product withdrawals and recalls
- Verify 3PL storage availability
- Verify/make changes to distribution network
- Check for new shipping restrictions and alcohol permits for each country
- Check availability of pre-bottled wines (without labeling) with inventory, by year, type and variety
# 4 Immediate Delivery Plan including Transportation
- Near-term shipments to customer
- Align physical and digital supply chain
- Outbound carrier availability
- Alternative carriers
- Verify carriers’ ability to clean/sanitize trucks
- Customs/border issues, permits and restrictions
#5 Supplier Inventory and Near-term Delivery Plan
- Supplier recovery checklist
- Mapping of suppliers (location)
- Review raw material risk assessments
- Supplier qualification status
- Supplier inventory and traceability system
- Immediate delivery requirements
- Sub-supplier inventory
- Suppliers deploy this checklist with sub-suppliers
- Supplied material transport arrangements
#6 Availability of Suppliers of Services and Outsourced Processing
- Status of service and outsourced process suppliers (shutdown, partial operations, staffing, etc.)
- Risk assessment of services and outsourced process providers
- Current open orders/contracts with service and outsourced process providers
- Requalification of services and outsourced process providers
- Review of your inventory items at outsourced process providers
#7 Temporary Process Changes
- Review/update process flow diagrams
- Process layout changes, (e.g. cycle time, work content)
- Review/update hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP)
- Review/update rework/recycling plans
- Temporary changes to process controls
- Temporary procedures/work instructions
- Training of personnel on temporary process changes and temporary controls
- Handling of process outputs, including finished goods, intermediates, by-products, and waste
- Supply chain network design changes, (contract manufacturers; alternate shipping/modes; port strategy; supply chain mapping)
- Find new personnel to maintain the fields and all agriculture processes
- Increase Internet coverage in remote areas to allow home office or remote process
#8 Product/Process Requalification Plan
- Review all the wine tank/wine production, their stages and next process to be started
- Review field status, watering systems, conduction systems, agriculture machinery and materials for field control
- Define a new process to merge wine production of both years and create a communication plan to handle two years’ joint production
- Review third-party producers’ fields in order to account for their production and the need to reduce/increase producers and contracts
- Evaluate working with varietal wine and define the quantity and volume of reserve wines for next year’s offering to customers
- Evaluation of renting new cellar to age reserve wines in good condition
- Revalidate critical control points and processing characteristics (from field to wine production; wine production to cellar; and cellar to bottling)
- Re-verify monitoring of critical control points and failure alert systems
- Prevent cross-contamination
- Review equipment failures and/or deviations
- Update hygiene, sanitation and inspection plans
#9 Accuracy of Work Instructions
- Work instructions for quality and laboratory testing in the following areas: wine production (tanks), and cellars
- Work instructions for quality check in the fields; number and situations in plants; and other important systems (irrigation, conduction systems, etc.)
- Evaluations on production demand from different areas and countries
- Work instructions available for all quality and supply chain processes
- Work instructions describing essential internal process and system steps/actions to appropriate level of detail
- Verify alignment with product standards
- Work instructions ensuring good quality product and on-time delivery to customer
- Updated with revised operator safety rules
- Re-train all operations personnel, (including temporary/contract workers)
#10 Workforce Availability & Training
- Check current job descriptions for accuracy
- Immediate staffing plan, (onsite personnel, shifts, work teams, work-from-home, etc.)
- Refresher training for workforce, (general and job-specific)
- Immediate backfill of critical vacant functions that may not be returning to work
- Cross-training to support immediate and potential vacancies
- Managing COVID-19 virus awareness
- Interim sick leave policies, etc.
- Training on revised work procedures, cleaning protocols, personal hygiene requirements
- Temporary/contract workforce needs, and alignment with interim policies
#11 Equipment, Tooling & Gauging
- High-risk equipment/tooling (restart sensitive)
- Equipment restart procedures
- Tooling condition
- Review effectiveness of equipment/tooling/gauging packaging and preservation conditions
- Reset time-dependent maintenance, (preventive, predictive maintenance, periodic overhauls)
- Review spare parts inventory
- Check status of maintenance/tooling outsourced service providers
- Reset gauge calibration status/schedule
- Review equipment, tooling and gauging modifications previously in progress, (including production trials)
- Keep shared devices cleaned, (scanners, tablets)
#12 Facility Infrastructure
- Start-up and stabilize plant energy media, (electricity, compressed air, steam, chilled water, etc.)
- Review waste streams; consider additional waste streams due to COVID-19 virus management
- Inventory and sourcing of non-production items, (including additional PPE, cleaning supplies, etc.)
- Review stability and restart of IT systems while ensuring a focus on cybersecurity
- Review plant security protocol, (e.g. controlled access areas)
- Staffing of Health & Safety services
- Update cleaning and sanitizing plans (including allergen controls)
- Environmental and operational programs (e.g. pest management)
#13 Communication Plans
- Identify communication channels for all affected stakeholders
- Customer and other stakeholder communication plans
- Manage COVID-19 virus communication plans
- Operation restart communication plans
- Launch changes
- Schedule changes
- Establish frequency and nature of near-term ongoing communications
Stephen Dombroski is director of consumer markets at QAD, a leading cloud ERP solutions provider.
