GALLO is on a journey to make better supply chain decisions. “I think one of the key things that I've realized is the fact that we have so much software, but we don't have enough signals to use to make decisions,” Nitin Murali, the vice president of supply chain excellence, explained to me. “So, the focus was on figuring out how we could close that signal deficit. How do we make sure that we are focused on making decisions at the right time, faster, and at scale?”

GALLO, which changed its name from EJ Gallo in 2024, is a private, family‑owned alcohol beverage company with more than 7,000 employees . Their headquarters are in Modesto, California.

This 90-plus-year-old company is best known as a provider of economy-priced wines. It is the largest wine producer in the world by volume . It has 130 brands across wine, spirits, malt, and ready‑to‑drink beverages. They have the top-selling wine -Barefoot - and ready-to-drink hard seltzers - High Noon – in the United States. They sell their products in 110 nations.

The company works with more than 3,000 suppliers . In addition to grape growers, these suppliers include companies that provide branded wine imports, bulk wine, contract manufacturing, packaging, energy, technology support, and raw materials.

The company exports California wine and imports wine from Argentina, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, and Spain. Gallo imports spirits from Australia, the Caribbean, Italy, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. Gallo has been shrinking its manufacturing footprint in response to a national decline in alcohol consumption.

GALLO publishes a sustainability report and was the first winery in the United States to earn ISO 14001 certification for minimizing its environmental footprint. Supply chain efficiency is part of their sustainability efforts. When they opened an East Coast distribution center in Chester County, South Carolina, for example, they reduced the mileage their products traveled by about 3 million miles.

The size of GALLO, and the number of products, “brings its own combinatorial complexity,” Mr. Murali explained. “It's high SKU counts, product aging issues, you name it, we have it.” The three-tier distribution network, which alcohol firms are legally obligated to operate in the US, adds its own set of complications.

GALLO Selects Aera Technology

“Supply chain has an AI problem,” Mr. Murali recently wrote in a Forbes.com column, “and it’s not the one you think. We don’t have too little AI. We have too much software and not enough signal. The supply chain doesn’t need more software. It needs better signals.”

“Supply chain is planning and execution, and execution feeds planning. That feedback loop is where signals live. But in most organizations, by the time a signal reaches the next planning cycle, it’s been delayed, aggregated, or lost entirely.”

To solve this problem, I was told, “We had to completely rethink the approach. Decision intelligence was an up-and-coming space.” They began having discussions with Aera Technology. Aera was able to showcase how their solution would look in this newly defined space. “That was critical for us.”

The volume of repetitive operational decisions had outgrown GALLO’s ability to make them consistently and wisely without automation. They believed they could make these decisions much faster with Aera, thereby creating a great deal of value.

“We also realized that value was sitting in the boundaries between silos. The new agentic decision support solution was seen as being “silo-agnostic and more ecosystem-focused.” One event should send different signals to different teams.”

To resolve an event, the solution should provide context for each supply chain team. When there is an inbound shipment delay, the signal to the procurement team should prompt a discussion with the supplier. For the sourcing team, the suggestion might be, ‘This is the third time this supplier is late. There is a pattern here. Figure it out.’ For production, it could be ‘there's a delay. Reschedule your production line now, or your line is going to go down!’ This form of orchestration exists, but it is manual and too slow.

This is made even more difficult by the large number of systems they have. While they have standardized on an ERP solution that also provides several of their supply chain modules, they have about 400 boundary systems.

Aera uses data crawlers to process billions of rows of transactional data monthly. This is combined with data from external sources on weather, logistics lead times, and sustainability performance. These crawlers never stop working. They are designed to have minimal impact on the performance of the underlying source systems.

Machine learning algorithms are combined with business domain expertise to help make intelligent, just-in-time decisions that help a supply chain operate smoothly. Suggested decisions from this intelligence overlay can then write back into core ERP or supply chain applications. Aera has made more than 50 million digitized decisions across some of the world's largest enterprises.

Aera Technology calls itself a “Decision Intelligence” company. I call them a supplier of sales and operational execution software. S&OE is a short-term planning process that focuses on executing daily operations to meet immediate demand and ensure alignment with strategic goals.

Aera has pointed out to me, however, that while they are best known for supply chain applications, organizations are also deploying their solution across other operational functions, such as sales and marketing (I think this should be part of S&OE), and even one implementation that goes beyond a traditional enterprise use case.

GALLO began implementation at the end of 2024. They went live with their first skill in February of 2025. “Skills” is the term Aera uses to refer to context-specific decision support. It typically takes about 3 months to implement a new skill, although Mr. Murali expects this will get faster.

The customization in their ERP made standard integrations difficult, and GALLO is moving toward a clean core in their ERP. The Aera implementation was performed in parallel with the effort to get to a clean core.

Cultural issues also arose. The skill currently delivering the best ROI is direct shipping. With direct shipping, instead of shipping from a contract manufacturer to a GALLO distribution center and then on to a distributor, the shipment goes directly from the contract manufacturer to the distributor. Distributor change management was an issue. Distributors would need to send GALLO their buy plan via EDI. But GALLO’s size gave them clout to resolve these issues. “These were the kind of pains that we expected.”

Given the IT and cultural issues, implementing the first skill on schedule within three months was an accomplishment. “Kudos to the Aera team and our teams. There was a lot of good engagement.”

That close collaborative engagement eased internal cultural issues. “Adoption has been quite high for us with Aera. We had not seen something like that with any of our software implementations in the past. That was a big win.”

GALLO has also implemented stock rebalancing. If a product is about to expire, this skill ensures that the aging product ships first. They have gone live with five skills.

The next skill that the organization hopes to implement is MRP. This will be exception management at scale. Their ERP has different MRP controllers. Each controller can generate over 500 alerts across several categories. These include quantity, date, and lead time alerts, among others. There is no way somebody can manually go through those alerts on a daily basis.

Skills combine into ecosystems. GALLO is entering the planning and quality ecosystem in parallel. The company will eventually get into the production and sourcing ecosystems.

The director of supply chain excellence said they generated $890,000 in savings in the first year, exceeding expectations. That is roughly a one-year payback. But he is not looking at ROI on a per-skill basis; there can be a one-plus-one-equals-three type of ROI when skills are combined.

Most of their savings came from the Direct Ship skill. Expired inventory has only been live for about 4 weeks. They expect good savings from that as well. They initially focused on skills within the order-to-cash process because these can provide quick wins.

But companies need to look closely at the decision they want to make and consider it holistically. Supply chain decisions can cross boundaries; if one part of the organization or extended supply chain is not ready, that skill will not deliver value.

Furthermore, supply chains typically justify proposed solutions on the basis of cost savings. Supply chain organizations should also be looking at margin. That is why Murali has his eyes on the promotion management skill.

Getting a good ROI depends on selecting the right skill. In MRP, for example, they could solve some of the problems by adding custom ERP code, doing some of the planning in an adjacent supply chain planning application, or running MRP in a standard way and layering Aera on top of the application to address problems MRP can’t solve. The last option is the cleanest and quickest. “So, the question is never, where can Aera play? The question is, what's the problem that you're trying to solve, and what is the tool that will get you to that solution?”

Not all savings can be easily quantified. Workers, who now have more time to address alerts, are approaching them more strategically. Murali believes they are also more engaged. There is a waiting queue to work with the Aera technology.

But planners still need strong domain expertise. If a planner just blindly accepts all the recommendations generated by Aera, that is a problem.

AI has generated conversations about the future of work. “I firmly believe,” Mr. Murali said, “that those conversations need to be around decisions. What decisions are we empowering? What is the total value that we are trying to generate? What is the long-term value for the organization?”