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When you’ve got more than 3,000 products to sift through for order pulling, precision and swiftness are keys to getting plants shipped successfully.
Bylands Nurseries in Kelowna, B.C., Canada, needed to boost efficiency when it came to processing orders. The 400-acre nursery sought help from SBI Nursery Software, which provided the grower with handheld scanners and a specialized software program.
Bylands organizes its loads by first printing a summary tag. The summary tag shows the customer, the ship date and other order information. The summary tag is used to pull the order from the field. At the shipping yard, workers use the handhelds to scan the order and assign it to a specific rack or pallet.
Next the forklift operators use tablet PCs to check off racks and pallets as they are loaded. This step finalizes the load and the orders in the system. Customers can receive a bill of lading that lists exactly which plants are on a specific rack.
“It’s really streamlined our order processing and allowed us to be more efficient,” said Mike Byland, sales manager at Bylands.
The nursery ships throughout North America, including the West, the Plains and the Midwest.
“It also helps us control our inventory. The live data is a really great feature,” he said.
Accuracy has improved by using the handhelds.
“This system allows people who don’t know plants, the English language or Latin plant names to still pull the orders correctly,” he said.
Plans are in the works to use the handhelds for onsite orders.
“We’re trying to make it so our salespeople can use the handhelds to scan plants at the garden center and send in an order,” he said.
For more: Bylands Nurseries, www.bylands.com. SBI Nursery Software, www.sbinursery.com.
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