The complexity of the green industry is compounded due to all the variables involved in growing a live product in a setting that often isn’t environmentally controlled. Labor costs are significant and can spiral out of control without a holistic approach to managing your operations. Instead of focusing on your problem areas for small incremental improvements, FlowVision will start at order entry all the way through shipping and link all the processes in between.
Live Products &
Green Industry
How to Implement Lean Flow
For Green Industry
We’ll start by examining your harvesting and loading operations and design a process by master pulling (grouping of orders and loads). FlowVision’s RIO software enables growers to consolidate orders to a master pull, and then into a Supermarket on your dock where a picking crew will efficiently pick the material by order based on RIO’s rack sheet or sticker. We’ll then bring the product to a processing table, where we’ll set up the process progressively, whether you are just tagging and cleaning, or you need to change pots. From there we’ll load them onto racks so we can stage them on the outbound dock – the product is then ready to load as soon as the trucks are available.
FlowVision’s Checks and Doublechecks process ensures that quality is incorporated into the process rather than the last process. We will link and balance all these processes together and teach you how to plan the labor such that each process looks more like an operation in an assembly line.
RIO gives your sales team a powerful tool to easily identify partially filled racks and upsell your customers, while also providing a clear window giving logistics enough time to plan the loads at maximum capacity.
To address transportation costs RIO is able to drive improvement through increased rack and payload optimization. In addition, RIO also helps to improve efficiencies on the dock even further by making it easier to locate product and assemble your racks. By un-siloing the tribal knowledge that sits with dock workers, RIO gives your employees the answer to the puzzle.
Using Progressive Sticking in propagation and/or transplanting operations can often drive substantial ROI. In propagation, instead of having one person stick all the cells in a tray, we’ll have multiple employees stick the same tray – one person will stick a third, while the second sticks a third and while the third person sticks the final third, just like an assembly line. In transplanting, we’ll want to perform the work progressively as well so that all operations are balanced. We’ll also link and balance the lines to the upstream processes feeding inputs as well as to the downstream laydown processes consuming from the lines.
Whether you need assistance fulfilling orders, planning propagation and transplanting or managing nursery or greenhouse maintenance, we will help you manage your daily labor requirements with FlowVision’s resource calculator. This tool will help you to balance your labor to the correct operations and ensure that you aren’t using more labor than required.
FlowVision delivers greater productivity, less air on racks, greater payloads and increased quality to the green industry. This translates into strong improvements in both working capital and cashflow, and therefore better profitability. We are the Lean Flow software and consulting company of choice in the green industry.
Mellano & Company
See FlowVision helped Mellano’s stay financially competitive as competitors continue to reduce prices.