Software is geared to leaving as little as possible to chance and to planning everything down to the last detail. Plants don't really care about that and can sometimes be unpredictable. How do you unite a living product and software?
You can influence growth by changing the light or temperature in the greenhouse, but ultimately a plant grows the way it wants. Growers, through years of experience in their field, are able to estimate how that process works. They can therefore make agreements with customers that they will deliver a certain order of plants at a given time. The set date is often met, although there may be situations in which growth is more or less than expected. At that point, the salesperson needs good and clear information.
What is often done is that a weekly tour is made by someone through the garden to see how much can be delivered, which is then compared to how many orders there are and what is still left. That relates to the current week; for the coming weeks, you mainly see that the planning needs to be looked at. Lots are in the field and must be ready on the planned day. In this situation, the sales rep must be able to assume that the planned output of batches will also be achieved.
In practice, this is not always feasible and shifts occur. This can be due to weather conditions, a plant is obviously a living product. So you have to keep your batch information up to date and compare it with the sales orders that are placed against it. You have to be able to see from this where you are going wrong with the numbers; where do I have too much and where do I have too little? This coordination often still takes place verbally. And via pieces of paper, post-it's and you name it.
That system works, but you're missing a place where the info comes together for the overview. What I've actually been seeing more and more recently is that software is starting to play a role in this. By digitally recording the data from the walk around the greenhouse, a simple comparison can be made with the orders.
In essence, such an overview always boils down to the same thing: stripping out supply and demand. But the nuance lies in the fact that one grower wants to know per characteristic, the other per length, per main group or per product group. An 'availability planning' functionality was recently developed in Agriware to meet these specific requirements of growers.
If you also register the drop-out on the floor and/or adjust the planning if growth is lagging behind, this approach becomes even more accurate!
The preceding story is based on the classic pot plant grower who produces on stock. Everything depends very much on the type of product you supply and the sales method in that market, but there is always the possibility of steering and influencing the growth of plants so that they are ready on a specific date.
You see that less and less plant numbers are delivered to the auction clock and, on the contrary, more are sold long term on order. That makes it necessary to know if your expected supply matches the sales orders. Some growers make sure they have a percentage of plants extra for free sale in addition to their fixed order deliveries. The challenge for a grower is to know exactly what is still available after the long-term planned lots have been sold.
With the use of software, has the walk around in the greenhouse become obsolete?
The person responsible for ensuring that the plants are available at the right time should check every day to see how they are doing. They need constant care and attention and that is the beauty of the profession. So the walk around the greenhouse or garden will always be there. But the more insight you have, the better decisions you can make.
In an ideal world, as a salesperson you want to be able to trust that if the system says something is available, that it is available. And you want to signal it in time if something goes awry. It is therefore useful to store the information obtained somewhere centrally. This could also be done by means of mobile registration, for example.
The mobile app we have now can do inspections and take measurements. You can indicate what the quality of the plant actually is, and a sales person can probably also get useful information from this. The best thing, of course, is that if people are in the garden and notice that a lot is lagging behind, they can indicate this directly in the system and adjustments can be made in time.
Examples of this are reserving free saleable stock of a week earlier or later, buying additional plants, or informing the customer that the plants are not available on time or earlier.
The trouble you wish to avoid is that an order needs to be delivered and you don't actually stock the plants. Then you have to buy additional plants from other growers. On a plant that you have to buy in order to sell again, you make little or no profit. Nor do you want the plants you had in mind for the order to be ready a week later without a buyer.
The added value that Agriware offers is that you store your information centrally, which gives you more insight. I see this need arising more and more with customers.
If your information is close to reality and you make decisions based on that information, you get a balanced planning and every stubborn plant gets a good spot.