Highlights:
- Improved productivity of facility by 50%
- ROI was less than 3 months
Dark Heart Nursery is California’s largest and most well-respected provider of young cannabis plants—or clones, as they’re called in the cannabis industry. For the last 10 years, they’ve been serving the medical cannabis industry by providing premium quality plants to growers throughout the state.
About Dark Hear Nursery:
Dark Heart Nursery is California’s largest and most well-respected provider of young cannabis plants—or clones, as they’re called in the cannabis industry. For the last 10 years, they’ve been serving the medical cannabis industry by providing premium quality plants to growers throughout the state.
The Business Challenges:
Dark Heart currently operates out of a high-tech, 20,000-sq. ft. indoor production facility in Oakland and that facility isn’t nearly able to keep up with customer demand, especially during the spring season. As such, they’re working to develop a new modern greenhouse facility in which to grow their business.
At the same time, California’s cannabis industry is going through monumental change. Beginning in 2018, the state is implementing new regulations and opening the market for recreational cannabis sales. They expect those changes will lead to increased opportunities and stronger competition in their part of the industry. Ultimately, they believe this will lead to lower prices and increased pressure to improve efficiency.
In preparation for these changing dynamics, Dark Heart has begun to increase their focus on improving operational efficiency. It was for that reason they started working with FlowVision to improve existing workflows and design production systems for their new greenhouse facility. Lean Flow techniques have been successfully implemented across all industries, especially in the Green Industry. FlowVision has helped hundreds of growers become more profitable and they’re now beginning to help cannabis cultivators do the same.
The FlowVision Solution:
FlowVision was contacted by Dan Grace, President and CEO of Dark Heart. Dan wanted to begin implementing Lean Flow in his current warehouse facility, knowing that eventually, he would build a greenhouse.
The first step was an eight-hour Lean Flow Training workshop that focused on Dark Heart’s specific processes. During the workshop, the Dark Heart employees learned the Lean Flow tools used to design a very efficient nursery. They learned how to use the tools and applied them to their business. Those tools are in four main categories: Data Collection, Calculations, Design and Implementation.
For data collection, the process flow shows what process steps are used to take the product from beginning to end. Dark Heart collected processes flow for all production products (For example: Prune – Slice – Stick – Bridge – Pull – Ship). Work and grow times at each process were collected so they could be used to calculate the number of people and machines that would be required for current and future requirements. Annual demand for each product and growth was projected, so they could determine the space requirement throughout the year.
For calculations, the time (the average time between the start of production of one unit and the start of production of the next unit) was calculated and is the key Lean Flow design driver. It determines the rate at which each process needs to produce to meet the customer demand in the available work time (without running overtime). Weighted standard time calculations look at every product that’s utilized at a process and, based on demand and work time, identify the weighted average. Resource requirements are calculated and identify the number of people, machines, and storage space required to produce products for today and future volume.
An example of the three calculations may look as follows:
- Takt time—If you need to stick 10,000 products per day to meet your customer demands and you work eight hours per day (28,800 seconds) you would need to stick one unit every 2.88 seconds (28,800 seconds ÷ 10,000 units).
- Weighted standard time—To keep this example easy, let’s say all sticking took five seconds, regardless of what plant you were sticking.
- Resource requirements—If sticking is all manual work, the number of people we need in sticking is 1.74 people (5-second work time ÷ 2.88 seconds takt time).
In a Lean Flow facility, these calculations aren’t just used for facility design at capacity. Lean Flow customers use them every day to determine the number of people, machines, and space requirements throughout the season, which allows them to increase productivity by more than 30% by staffing processes appropriately.
After the resources have been calculated, block diagrams are created to develop a non-scaled view of how the material should flow through the factory using blocks to represent people and machine resources. The final facility design is much easier after you complete a block diagram because you now know what the best flow of material is without the biased view of equipment constraints.
Flexible employees are an important part of a Lean Flow facility. Whether you’re setting up a progressive sticking line or improving your employee utilization by designing a shipping “supermarket,” teaching employees multiple jobs will improve a nursery’s efficiency. By using these Lean Flow tools, Dark Heart can use the above steps and lay out their new greenhouse to get the best flow and resource utilization.
Implementation
After the design is in place, it’s time to create the action plan to implement Lean Flow. Every task needs to have a responsible person and a completion date assigned to it. To keep the project on track there needs to be, at minimum, a weekly review of all tasks.
Dark Heart wanted to test their newly learned skills in some pilot areas. They first set up a progressive trimming line for clones where three operators would pass a tray of plants down a line and each person would trim approximately one-third of the tray. If one person got behind, the other people would share the work. If someone got ahead, they would do more. The goal was to work as a team and share the workload.
In the past Dark Heart would have one person trim the entire tray. The productivity improvement was shocking—50% increase in productivity (one-third more output with the same number of people).
The second progressive line that was tested was for the Prune Slice Stick processes. This progressive line yielded a 26% improvement in productivity, plus a higher yield since sticking is done seconds after the pruning takes place. The payback for the workshop and consulting was less than three months.
Dan said, “We have found FlowVision’s approach effective in part because it focuses on highly practical solutions. Most of their recommendations focus on simple changes in workflow and rudimentary equipment. Their focus is on optimizing the people, equipment, and facilities that you already have.”
