A good availability takes the time of the staff, and the right data about the items, and their condition and pricing. It also requires some publishing work as well for presentation to your customers.

The purpose of a grower’s availability is not to show what you have for sale.

The purpose of a grower’s availability is to create new sales orders. A grower’s availability is a key driver of new revenue. It’s very important because good availability is a key interface to your customers and will enable more sales.

However, the process of creating and managing a grower’s availability can be a challenging process.

It’s a lot of work. Yet, so critical for business growth.

What are the key aspects of a good availability and how can you improve yours?

Key Aspects Of Grower’s Availability

Each availability needs to contain the important information a customer requires to make purchase decisions. Here are 4 keys we have found over the years working with our customers.

What Do You Have And How Many Are Available To Purchase?

Tracking the items you have in inventory and the current quantities of your items is crucial for knowing what you can sell and for helping customer satisfaction.

How many of an item you can sell depends on several factors such as:

• The total number in inventory
• How many are ready to sell (to spec)
• How many are already allocated to customers but not removed from the nursery or greenhouse
• How many are on hold back for special situations
• Are any plants of that item needing to be scrapped (on hand but not really sellable)

Once you do that math, you can then know how many to ‘publish’ as available for sale.

If you are growing hundreds of SKU’s this can be an involved process without software automation.

What Is Its Condition If Applicable?

A condition is additional detail which describes the state of the plant for sale.

This could be whether a flower is budding or blooming, whether a shrub has foliage or other given seasonal aspects of a plant you sell.

Assessing and recording conditions for many growers is a crucial part of their availability process.

Recording conditions for your items requires software that supports the extra data. For some customers the condition is crucial to them making a purchase.

How Much Does It Cost?

When a customer looks at availability, they are usually contemplating a purchase to fill a need. Thus, it is important to provide the pricing. When a grower has different pricing levels or discounts for different customers this can make producing an availability difficult since it must be customized for the different customers. It takes a staff person a lot of time to build this level of customization for a customer – but it creates a really good customer experience. It is in joining this related data that a good software solution can really help.

Granted many growers, just publish their ‘catalog’ price on their availability and their really good customers know they can get their items at a better price. But it is a competitive advantage for a grower to be able to easily provide customized pricing for that customer without them having to do mental math.

How Do You Tell Your Customers Your Availability?

Once you have an availability that answers the key questions, how do you get that to your customers? How do you publish that availability?

For growers, there are many ways they can distribute availability information to customers.

Key Availability Distribution Methods

Paper Availability

Many growers still print out paper-based availability lists or price catalogs. They can provide these to walk in customers or through direct mail. The disadvantage is that the catalog doesn’t tell you how many you really can sell right now, and it does limit the pricing customization you can do. However, pricing catalogs are still very important for many growers.

Fax Availability Sheets

Yes, some growers still provide the faxing of an availability sheet to their customers that demand it and the taking of orders via faxed in requests (sometimes handwritten notes).

Electronic Formats

Computer file formats like PDF or Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel allow growers some improvements in editing and formatting of their availability.

Growers can use software programs such as Excel or Word to create documents that show their availability. Then these documents can be printed, emailed to customers or if the grower has the capability, downloaded from the grower’s website.

Online Availability

Online availability systems like GrowerOnline allow a grower to automatically** publish the key availability information and then have any customer or guest browse their availability (with customized pricing), get quotes or place orders.

Online availability is the ultimate in convenience, efficiency, up to date quantity and conditions, and benefit for both growers and customers.

We have had growers report that average order size increases by as much as 20% when converting to online availability. Note: Actual increase or decrease in order size depends on many factors. Your mileage may vary.

Ultimately the grower who makes it easiest for their customer to do business (available items, ordering, delivery) at reasonable prices will win business.

Online availability can be a key tool in your arsenal to aid ease of use and accessibility for your customers.

How Can Software Help A Grower’s Availability?

Manual grower availability collection and distribution are very challenging.

A manual availability system involves the following aspects:

Labor: There is the labor and time involved in checking or counting crops or doing availability walks.

Data Transfer: Then there is transferring that information into a system that can be used for creating an availability.

Merging Item and Customer Details: Further you may have to combine that information with other details such key item information like size or genus. You may need to add customer pricing to have a final data set with the details your customers need to make purchase decisions.

Accounting for Allocations: Additionally, you need to account for any previously allocated product from your master sales orders or previously agreed customer purchases.

Formatting and Publishing: Finally, when you have all the data together you must put it in some format that represents your business and makes the data accessible to your customers.

Dynamic Changes: And as new sales orders come in, or are updated, or plants are scrapped the true availability is constantly changing.  So the grower ends up repeating this work over and over and over again.

Copyright Advanced Grower Solutions

Effective grower software systems can provide aids to lessen the challenging aspects of availability and speed the production and distribution of it to your customers.

Track Inventory Quantities

Software products should provide entry screens for entering or adjusting inventory quantities. Additionally, flexible grower software like GrowPoint provides ways to customize the availability calculation to account for availability the way your operation requires.

Automate The Assembly Of Detailed Data Views For Availability

Software can also help automate the detailed data view that brings all the necessary availability data components of the item, with the quantities calculated, with pricing (if configured) together for publishing.

For example, in our GrowPoint product, we allow users to create a tailored view of availability. The powerful GrowPoint availability allows growers to combine:

1. Items the growers have designated as ready.
2. Quantities of the items (with any configured holdbacks or prior allocations)
3. Price level – can allow for individual customer pricing by SKU if you choose
4. Condition of the items if the grower desires to include that.

By having a system to support this data view compilation it is easy to do as many times as you need depending on the frequency of new orders, order changes and updates to inventory.

Availability Publishing Templates

Further, grower software should provide templates that allow the creation of published availability with the data fields you want, like item name, genus, size, quantity, price, etc. We can define templates that will allow the automated generation of the PDF or Excel format if that is your desired output. With these tailored template reports you can print out your availability on paper or send it to key customers via email.

Online Availability Integration

Growers need an outlet to publish their availability online. Grower software should provide mechanisms to send key data to an authorized outlet for online publishing.

For example, in our GrowPoint product, we can automate the sending of availability data during the day on a schedule the grower chooses. We can send this data directly to our GrowerOnline portal where the availability shows up instantly. Your customer can view the availability in a browser on a computer or mobile phone and create orders. The combination of these tools creates nearly frictionless availability publishing.

How Do You Want To Improve Your Availability Process?

Availability is a key data interface to your customers and its primary purpose is to drive new sales orders, and thereby revenue.

Good, updated availability that is convenient for your customers to consume and order from will drive new sales.

Growers can improve their availability process with the right data, work processes, and software tools.

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.

GrowerOnline is an online availability publishing and ordering system.

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.