When you think of efficiency in the greenhouse, it’s easy to go straight to the fastest and easiest ways to transport plants from point A to B. But efficiency should start before plants arrive, which means planning ahead is critical.
During Cultivate’22, a panel of growers and suppliers shared their success and failures on efficiency upgrades, from software and robots to purchasing strategies and logistics to attracting and retaining people. The panel included John Gooder, Chief Operations Officer at Plantpeddler; Tom Wheeler, Director of Growing Operations at Bell Nursery; and Cathryn Fageros, Business Process Improvement Manager at Ball Seed Co.
One of Fageros’ main roles is educating the Ball team on efficiency and lean production. She outlined four strategies for approaching efficiency in a way that benefits both your team and your customers:
- Understanding the customer and what they value. This starts with having a conversation with your customer to understand their needs. Once that conversation happens, clarify the priority of those needs and whether your company’s processes can meet those expectations. From there, you can make a plan and take action to deliver measurable improvements.
- Build a deep understanding of your own processes. Walk through all operations within your company, and document your processes. Then share this with your team to make sure it’s accurate. After you do this, create a value stream map so you can see the full picture of your operations.
- Reduce waste, inconsistencies, and overburdening in your processes. Identify the eight types of waste in lean manufacturing so you can find where they might exist at your company. Look for the opportunities to reduce peaks and valleys during production, and implement process changes. This should be done, according to Fageros, during your peak season, because that’s where problems with efficiency become the most evident.
- Continuously improve your processes and outcomes. Make process improvement part of your company culture, and measure what makes sense so you can track improvements over time. Communicate your successes so your team can learn from them.
For a grower like Wheeler who is managing production across multiple sites, following these guidelines is particularly important.
“Transportation is a huge challenge, and we’re always looking for ways to get more efficient with how we’re using our trucks,” Wheeler said.
In the greenhouse, the COVID-19 pandemic fueled overproduction across the industry. With demand starting to even out to past levels in 2022, Wheeler says there’s a bit of unpredictability.
“Our goal at all times is to balance plants per pot with crop timing,” Wheeler said. “If we can hit those marks, we can meet both plant demand and quality.”
Gooder echoed Wheeler’s thought on forecasting for demand, noting that inventory management has been difficult to plan for this year.
“We’ve found ourselves, in some cases, having to come up with contingency plans for container crops,” Gooder says.