Just six years ago, data collection in the vineyard was an unwieldy, paper and pencil affair for Eric Wylie, an agricultural engineer with Stimson Lane, a wine producer with 4,500 acres of vineyards throughout Washington State.

Whenever Wylie and his colleagues--four viticulturists and four technicians--went into the field to collect information about such matters as the number of buds per vine, crop damage following a hailstorm, or the distribution of beneficial insects, they had to record by hand every number and field note onto a form attached to a clipboard. The team then reentered the data into the company database stored in a central computer back at the home office.

The system gave rise to troubling inefficiencies.

The team had to return to the office just to type in data, a trip that could take as long as an hour-and-a-half. And everyone had to compete for time at a limited number of desktop computers there. Worst of all, staffers were inadvertently corrupting their own data. They made typographical errors and were prone to abbreviate detailed field notes. "If you have to touch data twice, the cost of the data starts skyrocketing," says Wylie.

As Wylie saw it, stemming such inefficiencies was a matter of eliminating the extra step. By 1997, the solution was, quite literally, at hand.

Wylie equipped his team with PalmPilots ranging in price from $150 to $350 and loaded with applications called Satellite Forms that he customized for data collection in the vineyard. Dispensing entirely with pencil and paper, team members now enter data directly into the handheld forms. When they return to their office, they need only a few minutes at a desktop computer to download the newly harvested information into the company database with the HotSync data transfer application.

"You can collect field notes without having to type in anything. The efficiencies that we gain are incredible," says Wylie, adding that the savings measured in terms of labor and equipment costs start to kick in after only 10 weeks.

The word has gotten out in the vineyards.

Renowned in his field for his facility with handheld devices, Wylie now receives calls almost weekly from colleagues at other winemaking companies eager to make the transition from clipboard to handheld computer, aka, personal digital assistant (PDA).

ScanControl, Inc., of Pleasanton, California, is a company that offers vineyard data collection tools for Palm® hand-held devices. This system is now used at Keefer Ranch in Sebastopol, California, and by Chateau Morrisett, in Virginia. The software allows users to collect data about activities performed on each vineyard row from pre-pruning to harvest. One can collect canopy management data, or record brix readings to understand more about the quality profile of a particular block or clone, and so forth.

"There's a lot of cause and effect analysis that is possible using these tools," ScanControl president Robin Wood says. "Vineyard managers can decide for themselves, which practices had the best outcomes in their operations and which of their clonal selections are performing best. This is even more useful in areas where a single vineyard manager has to manage multiple properties. You can track individual activities separately, which will allow you to assess your operating costs for each property. (ScanControl also has a package under development that tracks the production cycle within a winery.)

Vineyard specialists aren't the only ones in the wine business who are starting to recognize the timesaving potential of handheld computers. Like Stimson Lane's Wylie, professionals in other segments of the industry are doing much more with their PDAs than simply collecting email and updating their calendars and expense logs. While PDA technology does not yet play a major role in industry-specific business, it may be just a matter of time. There are compelling examples of wine companies and distributors getting in on the handheld act with applications that enable them to make rapid in-store audits of their products, obtain real-time inventory reports, even place orders automatically. And again, the value of the handheld computer in each one of these cases is as a tool that eliminates the need to fill out paper forms and reenter the data.

Brown-Forman Corp. has become an old hand at automating in-store audits using handheld technology.

It has been three years since the company hired Product and Acceptance Research (PAR) in Evansville, Ind., to develop proprietary software that would let 100 company sales reps scan or punch into a Palm-style Symbol SPT 1500s information such as the amount of product available in-store, the prices of competing products, and shelf locations. Before then, a rep had to fill out by hand a two-page, legal-size form for every store and, later on, type the information into a database. These days, data is transmitted directly from the handheld via phone modem.

"Data processing is where you save all the time," notes Mimi Zinniel, Brown-Forman's director of consumer research. While the company has not yet tracked the savings in terms of employee hours, Zinniel says the benefit is evident from the rapid turnaround.

PDAs Are Quicker

Gathering data with PDAs "gives the information we need so much quicker," she says. "Before it took two to three weeks. Now it's overnight."

The cost of developing this type of automation system is currently about $75,000, according to Skip Seaman, president of PAR.

A more recent adopter of PDA technology is the distributor Southern Wines and Spirits of California, which uses Windows CE handhelds as part of a newly automated sales process.

Up until 2001, SWS's sales reps were handwriting their orders and generating 500,000 sheets of paperwork per week. They could place the orders electronically over phone lines using a slow-moving data transfer system known as a Brick. But the system led to errors and fulfillment delays of up to seven days, and it couldn't provide sales reps with access to up-to-date information about inventories, prices, or a client's available credit.

SWS tackled the problem by hiring Advanced BusinessLink, a Kirkland Washington-based developer of a suite of Web-based Java applications for handheld computers called pocket Strategi®. The applications allow sales reps to use browser-like functions on the Windows CE device that links to an IBM iSeries server. The handheld, with up to 64 megabites of memory, can store most of the information sales reps need on clients and product availability. When the device is connected to the server, pocket Strategi® also allows the sales reps to automatically send orders and updates data that is stored on their handhelds.

SWS sales reps transfer data between the server and their handhelds via modem. But pocket Strategi® can also transmit data on a wireless network so that orders could be made in real time and other information could be updated continuously (unless, of course, the wireless connection is interrupted briefly because the sales rep has to conduct business in a basement.)

According to Steven Burrows, SWS vice president of sales and marketing, spirits, the combined costs of Advanced BusinessLink consulting fees, server usage and handheld equipment comes to about $3,000 per sales rep. But with just 700 reps using the device, SWS has started realizing significant cost savings, along with gains in employee productivity.

Adding to Sales Calls

Burrows says sales reps who use the handheld now make one to three additional sales calls per day. While he declines to site exact sales figures for privately held SWS, Burrows says that the new ordering system has already paid for itself by generating an annual sales increase of more than 5 percent. Additionally, thanks to greater order accuracy, customer returns have declined by 12 percent.

Given these efficiencies, SWS plans to have at least 2,000 sales reps equipped with the high-powered handheld by the end of 2003. Burrows says the next employees to be using PDAs on the job are sales merchandisers and delivery drivers. They will be using similar Web-based applications to facilitate what he terms "Web-based documentation" such as paperless signature capture.

Although the advantages of PDA use to the wine industry are significant, not even its most ardent champions claim the technology provides a perfect solution for all data entry and transfer needs.

Stimson Lane's Wylie notes that his handheld system cannot send data directly to a central database via a wireless connection, due to hilly geography and the remoteness of Stimson Lane's vineyards.

And despite the successes SWS has experienced with automating its sales process using handheld technology, the Advanced BusinessLink system is by no means one-size-fits-all solution. "A mom-and-pop winery could not take advantage of this," acknowledges.

Scott McBurney, vice president of business development for Advanced BusinessLink. McBurney notes that a company engaged in sales and distribution needs to have at least 50 users placing orders on PDAs to realize benefits like those enjoyed by SWS. (For smaller concerns there is Edward N. Eskind and Associates, a Nashville, Tennessee-based subsidiary of eSkyeSolutions, which offers an automated ordering system incorporating Windows CE devices that is suitable for as few as five users at a minimum cost of $12,000.)

Yet, the possibilities for handheld use continue to expand.

Wylie is beginning to make even greater use of existing handheld technology by introducing Palms with global positioning systems (GPS) capability that allow his team to match precisely vineyard locations with their corresponding data. Data mapped in this fashion helps the team discern variations in vineyard conditions and productivity over blocks as large as 100 acres.

Advanced BusinessLink's McBurney envisions leveraging existing PDA applications to store plan-o-grams (detailed maps for displaying products in retail stores) and marketing materials such editorial reviews, which could be distributed by sales reps equipped with small, mobile printers. In the same vein, PAR's Seaman urges using handhelds equipped with digital cameras to photograph displays that would become part of the in-store audit record and could be accessed on a PDA using a keyword search.

So far as SWS's Burrows is concerned, these applications are just the tip of the iceberg for PDA use in the wine industry. "I don't think we have figured out all the good things we can do with this," he says.

Zillah Bahar is a freelance writer based in Berkeley CA.