I was recently reminiscing about my days working in the nursery and how we had to have all orders approved by the sales manager, not for prices or availability but to make sure the order would fit on the truck.

When we asked how he knew which would fit and not fit we got the response of “I just know from years of doing it”.  This is great that someone knows but also scary that only one someone knows. 

This could have turned into a rant about the need for SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) but I will save that for another day.

What is a Load Factor?

The term load factor is used in many industries from Rail to Air to Electric transmission.  The most basic definition of load factor is “the load that is actually carried compared to the maximum load that could have been carried in a load unit” or, to be a little geekier, “the ratio of the average load to total vehicle freight capacity.”

Calculating the Load Capacity on a Truck

I would like to tell you that we understand these definitions and sat down and figured out how much of a truck was needed for each item in our inventory, but the truth is back in 1999 the J. Frank Schmidt catalog had a formula in the back explaining load factor and how many of each size tree would fit on a truck.

Armed with our new knowledge of load factor and the knowledge of our own loading crew’s ability to stack plants we assigned each item in our inventory with a load factor.  We then gave each truck a load factor.  From now on when we created a sales order, we only had to do the math of quantity of items times their respective load factors to get a total load factor.  Comparing this total to the truck load factor would tell us which truck to use to ship this order in the most economically way possible.

How We Created a Model to Assign Load Factors

We knew that we could fit 9000 1-gallon plants (the average 1-gallon stackable plant) on our 40-foot box trailer.

We used this as the baseline.  We gave the 1-gallon plants a load factor of 1 and the 40-foot box a load factor of 9000.

Since we also knew we could get 1000 5-gallon plants on the same truck we gave the 5-gallon plants a load factor of 9.  1000 5-gallon plants times a load factor of 9 resulted in a total load factor of 9000.

Using this model, we also were able to assign load factors to our trees.  We could load 100 2” b&b on the same truck so all the 2” shade trees were given load factors of 90.  (9000/100).

Once all the items in the inventory were given load factors, every salesperson at the nursery had a very good idea of whether an order would fit on a truck or not.

There are still other factors to consider, such as weight and whether the items are stackable, but it helped with the first hurdle of loading an order which is to make sure the doors will shut once it is loaded.

Learn More

Advanced Grower Solutions provides software that helps growers manage many aspects of the complex inventory process. GrowPoint is a complete inventory management and accounting software system. It allows for each item in inventory to have a unique load factor and weight assigned.  These values are then added up and given a total load factor per order AND, if the order is part of a load, a total Load, load factor.

Your support rep can assist with getting your load factors and weights assigned to your inventory items, and we can even show how to give the items seasonal variances to these values to account for growth spurts and the difference between summer and winter weights.

DTS/Merch is an cloud based, automated, sales analytics and replenishment platform.

Contact us today for a discussion of which grower technology is best for your organization (even if it isn’t ours) and request a free no obligation demo.