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From grape to bottle to glass, with the audit trail to prove it.

A family wine merchant in Bruges, founded 1949, wanting to sell to consumers across Europe without its costs following them.

Rows of wine bottles on shelves in a merchant's store
ClientWijnen Van Maele — Bruges, founded 1949
PlatformIBM i on Power S924, POWER9, CD-Invest cloud
BuiltCloud migration, Node.js interface, blockchain
ResultB2C platform without capital expenditure

A B2B merchant with a B2C opportunity

Wijnen Van Maele has operated in Bruges since 1949, supplying a range of some 900 wines to caterers, hotels and other trade clients in the region. The growth was clearly in selling to consumers across Europe — but not at the cost of building and running a transactional platform in-house.

Cloud first, then the interface

The company migrated its databases and business systems to IBM i running on a POWER9-based IBM Power System S924, delivered as a managed service from the CD-Invest data centre. That gave it the performance a transactional site needs while avoiding the capital and operational cost of on-premises kit.

We have created a web-based graphical-user interface using Node.js and JavaScript, which makes our business systems far easier to use than our previous green screen system. Better still, our investment in cloud-based infrastructure will save us on hardware and maintenance costs in the long term.

Axelle Van MaeleWijnen Van Maele

Applications and customer data moved with continuity for the business users, and a new company website followed, running on IBM i on the Drupal content-management framework. The non-transactional site alone drew thousands of visitors within days — evidence that the B2C audience was already there.

The blockchain part is not a buzzword

Large wine distributors increasingly require suppliers to provide granular data on grape quality and how long bottles have been stored. A blockchain application on IBM i gives Wijnen Van Maele a complete audit trail for every stage of the product lifecycle.

We have always focused on the stories behind the wine we sell, and our new blockchain application is a logical extension of this approach. We can now demonstrate, with hard data, just where our wine has been, from grape to bottle to glass.

Axelle Van MaeleWijnen Van Maele

It is worth noting what this is not. It is not a token, a currency or a public ledger. It is a tamper-evident record answering a commercial requirement a customer actually put in writing — which is the only good reason to use the technology at all.

What comes next

The e-commerce site, and an expansion of the existing telesales applications — giving staff better data about which customers order which wines, when and how often, so the offer can be tailored per client.

Thanks to our partnership with IBM and CD Invest, we are building the digital retail capabilities we need to thrive in B2B and B2C markets, and we're excited by what the future holds.

Axelle Van MaeleWijnen Van Maele

Source: cdinvest.eu portfolio, Wijnen Van Maele (2019). All quotations as published. Note: the e-commerce site was described as in build at the time of writing — confirm current status before publishing.

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