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Matching production to customer demand is perhaps more critical to greenhouse growers than any other industry. Growing and selling seasons are relatively short, and flowers, shrubs, and trees can’t sit on the shelf forever. If you don’t forecast production correctly and match it to customer demand, you either lose out on sales or end up throwing out products.
The key to solving this challenge is access to accurate data. With real-time greenhouse grower insights, managers can proactively make adjustments to production, the supply chain, and customer demand. Real-time data also streamlines sales and order fulfillment by allowing growers to know exactly what’s in inventory so they can make firm commitments to customers.
Growers generally have the data they need. It’s a matter of understanding what data to collect, when to collect it, and then putting the data in the right hands. Take for instance product availability. Before somebody picks an order, if they don’t know what’s available or where the product is stored, they might go to multiple greenhouses multiple times to pick up the right item.
Another area where real-time data is vital is order cancellations. The sales team needs to know right away if a large customer cancels an order so the company has time to sell that product to someone else.
However, getting access to real-time data is much easier said than done. This is particularly so for growers relying on basic accounting solutions, spreadsheets, paper and pencil…and what’s inside everyone’s head.
It’s impossible to bring all this data together quickly, compile it into meaningful reports, and distribute it to a widely-dispersed workforce. Even in the hands of spreadsheet wizards, vital information often does not come to light for a week or even a month.
By then, it’s too late to act. If you fail to deliver correctly too often on shipments to big box stores and other large customers, they will take their business elsewhere.
The solution many growers turn to for achieving real-time data access is SilverLeaf from Velosio. Tailored for the horticulture industry, SilverLeaf runs on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. This combination creates a world-class ERP system for growers—delivering enterprise-grade financials along with processes and reports that sync with the grower business model.
For example, with SilverLeaf, growers can take advantage of mobile capabilities that allow users to scan flowers, shrubs, and trees as well as locations, zones, bins and grow orders as they make their way through the greenhouse to the warehouse and out the door to customers. This gives everyone in the business a real-time view into available inventory and order status from any device—no matter where they work—at the office, in the greenhouse, at home, or on the road.
Users can also see production adjustments, the movement of material from one location or bin to another, and ready-day date updates. This comes in handy if someone in the greenhouse notices an entire crop of shrubs is sluggish in their growth. They can input the update into SilverLeaf, which automatically adjusts the ready date and shows the impact of availability on future sales orders. Managers can then determine if this will result in a major problem and work with affected customers to devise alternative plans.
Real-time data also helps from a logistics standpoint. With sales orders and transfer orders produced by SilverLeaf, shipping teams can easily plan how to load delivery vehicles based on the number of racks the orders require. This ensures trucks deliver maximum loads and roll to customer sites as soon as possible built for efficient unloading.
And because SilverLeaf integrates sales orders, purchase orders, production, inventory, fulfillment, and accounting, there’s no rekeying of data between departments. This reduces manual duplicative data entry and decreases errors. Across the entire order lifecycle, accounting can see everything that’s occurring within data-driven greenhouse operations, which helps with flow financial management and planning.
Another area where real-time data helps is assessing the supply chain for margins and grower profitability. When planning for supplies needed for production, if you use stale information, you might purchase the wrong materials, a different plant variety, or a different starter plant type—such as ordering plugs when cuttings are available. You might end up with entirely different production material compared to what you planned, and that can impact your financial health.
When additional products or the wrong variety of a flower or plant arrive unexpectedly from a vendor, adjusting the data in a manual system can also often hold up production. But with SilverLeaf, once somebody scans the bar codes on unexpected material, the system’s production grow orders and/or purchasing features something is wrong allowing for quick adjustments.
Users can then make substitutions in the system and have that impact inventory availability, sales orders, and purchase orders—everybody in the fulfillment chain has visibility immediately. This capability comes in handy, for example, when a grower orders 500 plugs of perennials, but 600 arrive. Or when an order for tangerine orange roses turns into pumpkin orange roses.
Real-Time Data Access in Action
Saunders Brothers uses SilverLeaf to pull data together in minutes with out-of-the-box reporting capabilities specific to the horticulture industry. By making data readily available, Saunders frees up time from manually producing reports so managers can spend more time making decisions on how to act on the data.
In the case of Milgro Nursery, it used to be a fire drill every day when receiving orders at night that had to be on the truck early the next morning. Today, the business relies on SilverLeaf for managing inventory and logistics. Managers can access data in real time to print tags for each plant, which helps organize truck loading. Milgro also uses the Grow Orders functionality in SilverLeaf to engage with multiple production orders at the same time, saving time while increasing order accuracy.
No matter what data you have, there’s always a helpful story behind the data that you will remember if you get the data in real time. A week or a month down the road, you may not recall that story—such as unusual weather or a problem with water or fertilizer that impacted production.
SilverLeaf greenhouse management software delivers data at the right time with the right data for resource optimization in greenhouse operations and reporting on greenhouse operations KPIs. This allows you to conduct accurate greenhouse data analytics to better understand why some products sell and others do not.
Without real-time data, orders may get delayed, or you may promise orders to customers you can’t fulfill. Unlike manufacturers, growers can’t just add another shift and grow things faster. As we like to say, you can’t put nine mothers on the job and deliver a baby in one month when you’re growing plants!
For more information, contact Velosio or check out our Data-Driven Insights for Horticulture Leaders eBook.
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