Highlights:
- Improved truck utilization from the low 90’s to over 97%
- Reduced discrepancies to almost 0%
- 42% reduction in total shipping labor (pulling through truck loading)
Company Description:
Corso’s Perennials is the wholesale division supplying perennials to a five-state area. Producing over ten million plants a year to supply major retailers throughout the Midwest, Great Lakes, and New England, Corso’s Perennials has grown to become one of the largest and most influential perennial growers in the United States. Today, Corso’s includes a greenhouse, flower shop, garden center, landscape department, and a wholesale perennial plant division.
The Business Challenges:
Transportation costs are one of the most significant expenses facing growers today. Corso’s knew that the racks they were shipping contained a lot of air and truck utilization was not where it could be. One of the contributing challenges was that they were pulling plants from two locations and had no process to consolidate plants from these locations into one for loading and thus ended up with partially-filled racks going onto trucks. “We were in the low 90s in terms of percent utilization of trucks and knew that there had to be a way to improve that,” said Corso’s owner, Chad Corso.
The FlowVision Solution:
“I had been reading about FlowVision for years and had heard them speak at multiple conferences, when we finally decided to invest in making our facility more organized and efficient FlowVision was the company to call,” said Chad. FlowVision proposed implementing the supermarket concept in the shipping facility to help mitigate the challenges of pulling plants from multiple locations. Along with that FlowVision recommended implementing RIO to help build out an end-to-end repeatable process to improve the entire pulling-to-loading trucks process.
Implementation:
Corso was in the process of building a new shipping facility to support their growth. This presented FlowVision with an opportunity to be involved in the design of the facility from the ground up. The new facility was completed less than a month before the start of the busy spring shipping season so the implementation of RIO was conducted under a tight time window.
Today, most roles in the organization have some interaction with RIO, and “several key people in the company and the entire logistics team use RIO on an almost daily basis,” cited Chad. While pulling crews in the field are using RIO to determine which plants to pull, the sales and logistics team in the office are writing orders as well as leveraging RIO to identify racks that are partially full and have upsell opportunities to maximize rack optimization. In parallel with the RIO implementation, FlowVision worked with the shipping team to implement FlowVision’s Dock Shipping Supermarket Methodology.
Results:
There was no good way to optimize groupings of plants and “RIO allowed us to make shipments more retail friendly by grouping similar plants on the same racks,” said Chad. “Before RIO, shipping 35 trucks would take from 7 am to midnight on a good day; after implementing RIO and the supermarket concept. we could load 35 trucks between 8 am and 6:30 pm,” continued Chad. This 42% reduction in total shipping hours helped Corso cut down on overtime as well as the number of people required in logistics. “We have improved our truck utilization from the low 90s to over 97%,” said Chad. Along with that, RIO’s intuitive workflow helped Corso cut their discrepancies to almost 0%.