Good morning!

If you have read our prior blog posts, you know that we are very big on keeping your inventory pristine.

The best way to do that is to supply your staff with ways of collecting data about events (planting, pulling, moving, dumping and marking as ready) in a way that makes their job easier. Our inventory app handles a lot of these events well, but the pulling of plants for shipment requires a more specialized app to handle the event properly.

The majority of nurseries that we serve, as well as those that we speak with, indicate that they allow their pull crew to decide where to pull the product from for their daily shipping needs. If you are going to have an accurate inventory, those pulls need to be recorded and entered into the system. This requires the pull crew to write it down and someone in the office to enter the data.

This is where our formula of making things easier for your employees comes into play.

Your outside crew has to write down where and how much they are pulling each product from. Just giving them a place to enter this on a phone or tablet isn’t enough. We need to give them a reason to want to use it.

So we arrange the pull list in a logical order to travel throughout the nursery. They can decide to pull some or all from the location offered or easily decide to pull it from the next available location, which will come up when they get there. They can enter what they pull from there and the system will tell them what remains to be pulled. Even better than that, the app will not have them pull anything that is already at the staging area (dock or packing area) because it was pulled yesterday and not shipped.

This gives them incentive to use the app.

It also gives you, the manager, several advantages and cost savings in this entire process.

• The pull was run in the efficient manner (Labor savings).
• The items and quantities pulled were immediately reduced from the inventory (Inventory is correct, even for someone out in the field taking a physical inventory at the same time product is being pulled).
• The inventory pull data no longer has to be entered by someone in the office (Labor savings and eliminates errors).
• Another virtual pull can be run later in the day. It will have only the add-ons that haven’t yet been pulled.

The net results of using the new app are cost savings, a more accurate and up to date inventory and a way to handle add-ons without running around  and manually handling things.

Get with us to discuss the potential of your organization using this method for your daily pull. We’re happy to help!