Easing the process of shipping and logistics

When it comes to delivering products, there are several factors to keep in mind. Communicating which products will be shipped on which truck, scheduling vehicle maintenance, last-minute order adjustments and calculating overhead shipping costs (just to name a few) can be a lot to handle, but options are available to help effectively organize the ins and outs of growers’ logistics operations. Chris Nesbitt, sales executive at Practical Software Solutions in Concord, N.C., explains five ways software can alleviate information overload.  

 

When handling sales orders, it’s important to keep in mind the customer’s experience, says Nesbitt.  

 

“Looking at the customer’s perspective, you are their supply chain,” Nesbitt says. “If a customer dictates that they want a particular product at a particular time, your ability or inability to meet those expectations will drive your overall customer satisfaction rating. If that rating gets lower, you run the risk of losing customers.”

 

Software programs like DemandLink and Sales Order Mass Change can manage those orders so that when it is time to pull the product and prepare it for shipping, the customer’s expectations are documented correctly and growers can gauge the ability to meet those expectations.

 

The software has the ability to add multiple products to orders, delete products, shuffle dates and do updates to hundreds of orders at a time instead of manually manipulating each individual order.

 

For example, “Let’s say that the original plan of the order was to ship a particular begonia and that product was nowhere near ready, but I had 100 orders that called for that item to be shipped this week. But I wanted to substitute a petunia to fill that slot,” Nesbitt says. “I could use Mass Change and remove the begonia product and replace it with the particular petunia I know is ready.”

 

Communicating with customers to send invoices and apply payments is another important factor when it comes to delivering your product.

 

“Somehow the customer has to communicate to you what they want, and you have to be able to reply and let them know what you can provide as well as what you did ship,” Nesbitt says. One of the tools is called Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which works well with big-box retailers, to communicate inbound orders and outbound advanced ship notices (ASNs) and invoices.

 

“We can also use tools such as automated emails and faxes to communicate to our non-big box customers things such as product availability and invoicing (or sales order acknowledgments). And those would be sent out automatically just like when you go online and you order something from Amazon and Amazon says, ‘Thank you for your order, here are the details,’” he says.  

 

Part of ensuring your inventory availability is to forecast and plan ahead. Projections must be advanced enough to predict what sales numbers will be so that growers’ can get a head start on growing cycles to ensure the product will be ready.

 

“We cannot just turn around tomorrow and ship a product that was started yesterday. You just can’t do that, not in this industry, so we have to have some good sales analysis tools to look at what the forecast of demand might be,” Nesbitt says.

 

Nesbitt says growers also need to take it a step further to determine current availability and look ahead to see what particular product numbers appear to be high or low and anticipate discrepancies.

 

“If I have an advance look on sales and sales trends, I can better anticipate the needs of my customer. I then can see what product is due to come online this week and how that’s trending. I might be able to buy some in to cover any shortages I might have. Programs like DemandLink can give us access to the sales data and trends we need to make better decisions,” he says.

 

Last-minute decisions also call for data management. If there is too much of one product, the Sales Order Mass Change system can help swap products out for other sales orders where there may not be enough availability.

 

“To deal with the inventory in the system and to track the production in the system is really key when trying to manage customer expectations,” Nesbitt says.

 

In some instances, it may be necessary to hand-key a sales order for some growers, but most of the time it is more efficient to use an interface or import utilities to keep track of larger orders.

 

“If that were to be done by hand, that would be a disaster when volume gets higher,” says Nesbitt. “Fulfilling large amounts of orders across the size of most greenhouses can also be a daunting task. We also break out what we call ‘logistics reports’ or pull reports by order so that you can do a bulk pull where they can go and pull the products in groups – class or type – so then they can get all the particular product for all the orders they have to ship today and then later break that out by order. This minimizes the trips the pullers need to make to a single location in the greenhouse.”

 

“The cost of shipping a product is something that just hits the bottom line – there’s no way around it,” Nesbitt says. The goal is to minimize that cost as much as possible.

 

For growers, the model for determining the cost of the product does not include the separate cost of delivery (e.g. $4.95 shipping and handling), so that cost must be factored into the invoice. And there are several factors to consider that affect shipping, such as the cost of a vehicle, fuel costs, vehicle maintenance, and a cost for the driver (usually per mile or per stop).

 

“One way we do that is integration with products like TruckStops, which will go through and read our data for what orders we shipped on a particular time frame, and route those orders for most efficient use of time, miles or stops and make that as efficient as possible,” Nesbitt says.