Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) has undertaken a consolidation project with the aim of replacing a number of integration technologies into a single, maintainable platform. Leonardo has been engaged to deliver the work and manage the project end to end. The project team delivers the work both onsite and remotely from the Melbourne office. The Leonardo project team works closely with TWE’s internal infrastructure and networking team to determine the most appropriate setup applicable for their IT operations, as well as working with TWE’s existing integration development and support teams, to ensure that the technical implementation and changes can be handed over and maintained effectively by TWE’s operational team members.

At present, TWE has 3 core integration platforms which it uses and maintains in order to support its business operations, including order to cash processes, electronic message interchange with various trading partners, winery operations, finance and HR systems, ERP integration as well as management of manufacturing and logistics service providers and partners. TWE has a large number of business scenarios which are heavily reliant on integration systems and encompasses both internal (application to application) and B2B (business to business) interactions. A large part of the project being undertaken by Leonardo to consolidate a number of existing technology platforms together is to help reduce cost and complexity within TWE’s IT landscape, and help improves development turn around time for future initiatives, while at the same time reducing total cost of ownership and removing inefficiencies relating to integration and application development.

Treasury Wine Estates is a global winemaking and distribution business with headquarters in Melbourne, Australia. It was formerly the wine division of international brewing company Foster's Group. With many recent acquisitions of wineries and associated businesses across the globe, TWE's IT system also needs to keep up with the diverse market demand. TWE's more technology-savvy online retailers demand better accessibility to real-time interaction with TWE's customer and product data, as well as the ability for TWE to continue to maintain and support existing B2B relationships it has in place with many of its existing trading partners.

Treasury Wine Estates has a large number of trading partners across the globe exchanging transactional messages electronically through heavily adopted global standards (EDI) and places critical dependency on technology and integration to be capable of being able to handle both the volume and complexity of these messages, whilst at the same time being flexible and adaptable to changing needs, patterns and standards which continue to be adopted over time.

Leonardo has been assisting TWE with projects and BAU support of their Integration platform since 2017.  Leonardo’s Enterprise Integration Architects, Designers, Developers, Platform specialists and associated Support teams have assisted TWE with:

• The review of their complex integration platforms and out-dated development practices. This was delivered in the form of a detailed Blueprint which outlined the current as-as state of TWE’s existing systems and platforms and catalogued the list of existing integration components and services which needed to be addressed.
• Establishment of a new cloud-based platform (OpenShift) capable of supporting our new integration layer (Red Hat Fuse) as well as a scalable runtime environment to support future application development and complimenting technology deployments. This was done by leveraging TWE’s existing cloud infrastructure of choice (AWS) and resulted in the establishment of a non-production and a production cluster, deployed in line with Leonardo’s DevOps practises including a reliable code repository, automated CI/CD deployment and a clearly defined architecture.
• Analysis and design of new integration components based on existing implementation and technical requirements. Leonardo’s design and development team worked closely with TWE’s internal support team to understand the flow of communication between different systems and partners, and designed new services, components and API’s which could provide the same level of functionality, while at the same time meant being able to reduce waste and rework where possible and defining end to end interfaces which could be logged, tracked and managed more effectively than previously.
• Development of new services and automated unit testing, as well as knowledge handover with the existing TWE teams. Leonardo’s team has lead the development effort of TWE’s new integration platform since the inception of the project and has involved TWE’s developers in the process throughout. In order to ensure that the required skills, patterns, processes and documentation are maintained to a high standard, Leonardo has frequently held knowledge sharing and showcase session with TWE’s teams.
• Managed File Transfer solution. As part of the development effort, TWE has a large requirement for a solution to the movement of files both internally, and over their B2B channel. Previously, file transfers were managed within a 3rd party platform. Leonardo’s design team analysed the specific patterns required by TWE’s file movement scenarios and was able to develop a highly flexible, configuration driven solution which could be deployed seamlessly into the new platform. This new MFT framework has meant that existing file movement requirements, as well as the definition of new file movement interfaces, can be defined and deployed with any further development requirement. This has proven to be a major cost saver by reducing the implementation time substantially for file bound transactions.
• Replacement of B2B platform to cloud-based service architecture. Leonardo is continuing to develop TWE’s end to end technical process flow by working to replace the legacy B2B platform which has been in place for many years. The approach which has been taken is to leverage best in class EDI and B2B based cloud provider connections (via Software AG’s B2B.io platform) and define a full end to end solution which allows existing trading partners to continue to interact with TWE uninterrupted, while at the same time working to modernise and simplify TWE’s B2B architecture, and reduce the overall cost of the B2B solution.

Leonardo is implementing a new platform for Treasury Wine Estates to replace a number of existing products. As part of this phase of work, Leonardo has implemented a DevOps process to assist in the development, build, and deployment of newly refactored integration components. Leonardo works with Treasury Wine Estates' internal IT team to manage release and change management.  

• To support TWE’s agile business requirements, the review recommended modernisation of TWE’s middleware platforms and development practice with container-based PaaS platform and CI/CD automation.

• After the completion of Leonardo’s ICE’s Discovery and Blueprint phase, TWE has continued to engage Leonardo to deliver the Establish & Enable phase of the engagement (and beyond) with the intention to replace all of its legacy middleware platforms.  

• Leonardo is responsible for documenting all technical deliverables across the integration platform, including system architecture, solution design, network topology, data models, and governance/ meeting packs.

Lenoardo has been able to deliver value to TWE’s IT operations and assist TWE in progressing its overall strategy by reducing the number of available platforms and systems previously present within the business. Prior to the consolidation project, there was very little alignment between IT operations and business expectations, and very little consistency in the way technical challenges were addressed, innovation was delivered, and in particular with how requirements were understood and developed.

Since Leonardo’s involvement, TWE has a more detailed and defined approach to identifying and communicating business requirements and articulating those requirements into technical deliverables. Leonardo has also established a more robust development lifecycle, and places higher importance on well-documented design, automated testing, peer reviewing and automated deployments of new features and changes. We have also been able to introduce component-based development, which means the code base is modular in design, which allows for better reuse of previously developed components, and is adaptable and configurable, which in turn reduces development effort and turn around time from business requirements to go live.

The target has always been to reduce the total cost of ownership, and reduce the complexity of TWE’s integration platform landscape and define new methods to allow TWE’s broader cloud-based technology platform to become realised. With the introduction of this piece of work, we have enabled TWE’s core technical processes to shift more towards a cloud-based implementation and created a robust, scalable and highly manageable platform.

Leonardo continues to develop innovative ways to consolidate TWE’s integration challenges and is continuing to work through the reduction of legacy systems. As an added benefit to the work which TWE and Leonardo have undertaken, we have been successful in enabling the business to start to address its next set of technology innovation and have developed API ready services, which will pave the way for TWE’s next major initiative.