Milgro Nursery Plants the Seed for Continual Operational Efficiency with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Velosio SilverLeaf

Background

The Milgro Nursery team is proud of its superior quality of potted floral and innovative marketing concepts. Milgro promotes plants and flowers as a lifestyle and is constantly trialing and researching new products to bring to its customers, including big box retailers like Walmart, Kroger, and Trader Joe’s. Milgro has a rich history of over 40 years, two generations and two greenhouses.

Milgro was challenged by its use of Microsoft Dynamics NAV with its then-current complimentary third party solution to manage operations. One of Milgro’s primary pain points was centered on the ability to accurately value their inventory. Inventory inaccuracies resulted in millions of dollars in incorrect entries and adjustments – causing a lot of frustration for the Milgro team. They ended up doing a lot by spreadsheet, which became a fragmented, manual process.

“With the incumbent systems, our inventory wasn’t posting correctly, and we lost faith in its ability to support our needs,” says Ryan Porter, controller for Milgro. “We had a three trillion dollar – yes, I said trillion with a ‘t’ – error for inventory. The numbers wouldn’t even fit into the columns on the report – it would go to the next line. I spent hundreds of hours trying to fix financial statements. We could ship items and enter AP, but we were limping along,” continues Porter. Adding to the challenges, Milgro was hosting its solution on premises in its facility in rural Utah, a unique location where geothermal energy allows Milgro to heat the greenhouse environment cost effectively and sustainably, but Wi-Fi is spotty.

“We finally decided it was costing us more to not upgrade and move to the cloud than it would to take the leap of faith and upgrade,” says Porter. “Unlike other industries, if our inventory shows up at a customer site and it’s the wrong item, they will throw it away instead of returning it because it’s a live plant. Inventory inaccuracies are expensive in our line of work,” continues Porter.

Additional complexity for Milgro is growth time and planning. “If we want to sell Easter lilies, we need to plan it just right where we are importing the bulbs from Holland and planting them in time to bloom so we can ship to customers at exactly the right time. It’s a very complex process with many moving pieces – the cost of soil, pots, pot covers, and more. We needed a system that could get its hands around all of that,” continues Porter.

Solution

The Milgro and Velosio teams saw that there were inefficiencies in the previous solutions which could be solved with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central coupled with Velosio’s SilverLeaf for Horticulture solution. SilverLeaf for Horticulture is designed to work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central’s core manufacturing and costing functionality and would simplify processes and provide more accurate inventory and costing. The primary challenge with migrating to BC and SilverLeaf was that there was not an existing migration tool. Velosio decided to write a migration tool internally so that the Milgro team would not lose any data. Because of the long-standing partnership between Milgro and Velosio, Milgro had confidence that the Velosio team would be able to bring forward their data.

“Velosio gave us a very realistic idea of the total cost of the solution instead of trying to just sell the deal and then stacking a bunch of stuff on the end,” says Porter.

The Milgro team was focused on modernizing its solution and moving to the cloud with confidence, and dedicated resources from Finance and Operations to get them there. This would ensure knowledge transfer and user acceptance from the entire Milgro team. Instead of the information being held in one person’s mind, there are videos and documentation so that anyone can pick up the pieces if someone on the team is out sick or on vacation. “The implementation went even better than expected – it was actually amazing,” says Porter. “We completed two mock implementations [of BC] prior to go-live which really helped with the transition and user acceptance – something that was missing from our previous NAV implementation – test, test, test,” adds Porter.

“Velosio often asks us for feedback on the Silverleaf solution, which is awesome. I don’t know many software systems you use where you can offer feedback – it’s nice to have the connection with Velosio where we can help further advance the system,” continues Porter. “Velosio has the resources to be able to support us. In other words, you don’t have one person who’s trying to cover all areas of the implementation – it’s a full team which offers efficiency. Velosio has it all – it’s a one-stop-shop for all we need, and the support is local and very timely. Our support person at Velosio is absolutely the best I’ve come across in 30 years of using systems – he’s incredible. Because of the excellent delivery team at Velosio we came in under budget,” says Porter. “Velosio spent time and money to learn about our operations, and we appreciate that. I never feel like they are in it for the money, but to make us successful. Velosio is as interested in our success as we are,” adds Porter.

Benefits

The Milgro team is pleased with its move to the cloud and use of additional features and functionality that were not available in its previous solution. Milgro has adapted some of its processes to match the best practices found within the system, instead of changing the software to meet its processes. “In some cases, we’ve found that by adapting our processes to match the software, some things actually work better as far as grow cycles and more,” says Porter. “Some processes make more sense now that we can tie them to the processes within the software. There’s a lot of renewed excitement at Milgro around the new system,” continues Porter.

Whereas it used to be a fire drill every day when receiving the Trader Joe’s order at 8pm the night before the orders must be on the truck by 6am the next morning, Milgro streamlined the process for improved customer service. The team can now print different tags for each plant depending on the customer (i.e., Trader Joe’s vs. Safeway) without a lot of overhead. Milgro is also using SilverLeaf Grow Orders functionality to engage with multiple production orders at the same time, saving time while increasing order accuracy. Improved inventory accuracy is saving the organization lots of money. “The transition from NAV to BC was seamless,” says Porter. “We were worried that there would be a big learning curve, but the systems operate very similarly from a user perspective, and BC is very user friendly,” continues Porter.

Additionally, Milgro has:

• Cloud based system ensures stability, accessibility, uptime, and increased security
• Mostly eliminated need for outside IT support
• Reduced manual processes and reliance on spreadsheets
• Standardized processes and business data
• Connected sales, finance, and operations with a single end-to-end solution
• Better tracking customer agreements to access details about prices, discounts, delivery dates, product availability, and fulfillment status
• Integrated with ordering platforms used by retail customers
• Maximized racking and packaging efficiencies
• Real time inventory availability
• Streamlined load management
• Improved tracking of inventory grow cycles, movement, placement, and location
• More accurate financial reporting

Future Plans

Milgro recently purchased Microsoft Copilot AI to gain additional efficiencies, work smarter, be more productive, boost creativity, and stay connected. Copilot works alongside Microsoft tools and intelligently adapts to Milgro’s needs. “We had an operations meeting the other day and Copilot took the notes for us,” says Porter. The modernized Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC and SilverLeaf solution has served as a springboard into new technology across the organization for a culture of continued innovation. “We’d like to incorporate Power BI into our business moving forward, as well as EDI for our retail customers,” concludes Porter.