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IT service provider DWS has replaced Wine Australia’s aged wine exporting system in collaboration with software vendor Accela.
The new software-as-a-service (SaaS) system, the Wine Australia Licensing and Approval System (WALAS), is based on Accela software and can process over 200,000 transactions from more than 3,000 wine exporters around Australia per year.
Hosted on Microsoft Azure, WALAS supports end-to-end processing for wine exporters, enabling online licence and certificate applications with increased user control, including review and payment options in real time.
The new system, which started development in 2018 and had a soft launch in June this year in South Australia, comes replaces the previous Wine Export Approval (WEA) system, which DWS also implemented.
A spokesperson for the Australian Government statutory authority described WEA as a “heritage system” that had been incrementally updated for more than 20 years.
“It got to the point where the underlying software was so old, we needed to move to a new system,” she said.
“The WALAS system is a much more up-to-date system which allows greater customer self-service and allows us better scrutiny of data than in the WEA system.”
Andreas Clark, CEO of Wine Australia, said the new system will provide enhanced services to the wine export industry and considers it to be supporting critical infrastructure.
"Wine Australia's new system to manage the country's growing number of wine exports reflects our commitment to employing modern digital tools to better serve our grape and wine community," he said.
The WALAS project is the first joint execution between DWS and Accela, as well as the vendor's second Azure-hosted implementation in the Asia-Pacific region.
Months after the soft launch of WALAS, DWS was acquired by HCL Technologies for $162 million in late September.
