In a world of smartphones, tablets and high-speed Internet, tracking inventory, shipments and other internal elements of your business is relatively seamless; however, it wasn’t always that way. Greg Lafferty, senior account manager at Practical Software Solutions in Concord, N.C., reflects on the way software systems used to be, what advancements have been made in the past five to 10 years, and the newest software system elements that growers can take advantage of now.
“In 2006 when we started working with growers, so many of them were leveraging spreadsheets and, what we call, disparate systems. The way I define that is separated, unattached, uncommon – just different systems for different features. They might do their accounting in one tool, their inventory in a separate tool, and their production planning in a totally different tool all together,” Lafferty says.
This used to be the norm, he says. If a customer called with a complaint and a grower needed to figure out what happened from a data perspective (i.e. “Did we ship a product? Did we bill them for the right product? Did we get the money? Did they pay their invoice?”), he or she would have to look within many different areas—in most cases, seemingly endless spreadsheets.
And so it became an almost impossible task to keep accurate records, Lafferty says, with wasted time by doubling and tripling data entry to make all those systems match. “Every time you manually enter data, you increase the chance of creating an error. It is a part of the human element.”
However, as more growers have adopted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, the chances of human error have dropped significantly.
“One of the greatest assets of an ERP system is the complete integration between different business segments,” Lafferty says. “With greatly reduced manual data entry, plus data that flows between accounting, sales orders, production, shipping, and so on, having an ERP system provides a more powerful and efficient work environment.”
A decade ago, the Internet itself used to work differently, too. “Most of these greenhouses are not in midtown Manhattan,” Lafferty says. “In the city, you usually have a pretty decent internet service. Get out to a rural area and see how far that goes.”
But bandwidth over the years has increased significantly, and the development of 3G and 4G networks have allowed smartphones to piggyback off of those data capabilities to use them not only for research, but also for operational activities.
“As price pressures come from the big-box retailers, as there is a consolidation of the industry, as greenhouses are driven to be more efficient; executives are starting to realize the benefits of integrated systems, and being able to see data throughout their organization, as opposed to silos of information.”
Mobile devices also have adapted to take advantage of increased processing power and bandwidth. In the past year, Sage launched a brand new, web-native ERP system that allows businesses to access the entire enterprise system — financials, production, inventory, shipping, receiving, and so on – via a smartphone or tablet.
“Everything that you used to do sitting at your desk, you’ll be able to do on an iPad, whether that’s printing checks in accounting, placing sales orders, looking at inventory or shipping, all of that will be over the Web,” Lafferty says.
Practical also is developing its Grower Vertical module for this web-native version of Sage ERP. It will allow growers to have the horticulture-specific functionality they are used to in the prior version of Sage ERP.
The mobile web-native program also will help growers reduce their risk of human error (potentially entering duplicate data incorrectly) and it will allow them to expand their business.
“We can see our customers growing more rapidly and being able to make better business decisions because the information is all in one place,” Lafferty says. “[Growers are] able to gain more customers, and service their customers better because they have that technology in place.”
Photo: Dreamstime.com
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