One of the most important components of a grower’s operational management is managing the inventory they create and sell.

Inventory, as one of my college professors, said is ‘frozen cash’. So, its management and visibility are crucial for the best operational decisions.

Since inventory is so important it is crucial to have business processes and software that support those to aid in managing your inventory effectively.

Here are some key questions that your processes and software should help you track and answer.

What Do We Have?

The email comes in or the phone rings and the customer asks if you have something they need in stock. This is so common. The sales team has to be able to look up and see what they have in inventory.

Good grower software systems provide efficient ways to show what you have without driving around your facility playing ‘find the plant’.

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The software you use should provide ease of listing current inventory and allow adjustments if required due to loss or scrap.

How Many Do We Have?

The next question is how much do you have? A customer wants 100 but you only have 50 or was it 150? Knowing your numbers is important. Tracking the current quantities of your items is crucial for knowing what you can sell and for helping customer satisfaction.

Your grower software should allow you to track the changes in inventory quantity as you produce, sell or scrap so that current counts are accurate for new customer inquiries.

Current grower Inventory and adjustments screen
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Further, your software should allow you to account for the allocation of sales orders against existing inventory so you minimize the possibility of overselling. Overselling inventory always makes for difficult customer interactions.

Where Is It Located?

For growers with multiple fields or greenhouses or geographic facilities, location becomes crucial in finding things.

We have worked with growers that didn’t have the location granularity they needed and any sales order pull or maintenance activity could quickly devolve into a game of ‘find the plant’. ‘Find the plant’ wastes precious labor time. When you don’t know where your inventory is located you create huge inefficiencies in your business.

Software with key fields to track locations, types, sizes, etc. coupled with key business processes for accurate updates are crucial to effective labor and inventory management.

What Condition Is It?

Many growers also have to know the condition of their inventory. This could be whether a flower is budding or blooming, whether a shrub has foliage or other given seasonal aspects of a plant they sell.

Assessing and recording conditions for many growers is a crucial part of their availability process. This requires software that supports the flexibility needed to update, track, search, and present the different types of conditions relevant for their plant mix.

Is it Ready to Sell?

Many crop require some judgement as to whether the crop is “ready to sell”.

For growers selling to regional or national big box retailers this usually means the plans have reach a certain ‘spec’ – related to size, spread, foliage or bloom concentration depending on the plant.

For growers with many customer categories, “ready to sell” criteria may be different depending on the customer segment.

Ideally grower software should help you match condition with grower segment to quickly identify what is ready for any given grower type.

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When Will Be Ready?

Many growers with shorter turn crops have to answer this question as well. If the particular plant is not in a customer’s needed condition, then the next logical question is when will it be.

Many of our annual growers make future ready dates and quantities part of their availability listings as a way to secure future business. So the software growers use needs the data fields and search capabilities to have that available to customers in their availability listings if desired.

Is it already allocated to a customer?

Sometimes a grower, due to customer choice or agreement, will pre-select certain plant specimens for fulfillment of a current or later sales order. It is important that your software ‘know’ (be told) which plants are allocated.

In these cases the grower software should help you allocate a particular plant or plants in a location as for that customers. Some growers indicate this by colored tape or tags that are placed on the plants allocated. This serves as a visual indication to the staff that these are allocated and cannot be used for general sales order pull/pick.

Additionally, when you have several orders to pick among unallocated inventory the software should help you by allowing automatic or manual allocation depending the grower need.

By effectively marking and tracking allocated product you can better communicate with staff and help improve customer satisfaction.

Whats on Availability Now?

Another crucial aspect is the capability to show or publish availability so your customers can see and decide what they need to orders.

The hard thing about availability is it has to take into account many of the aspects and questions already discussed in this article to come up with a number that you want to publish. That number needs to be accurate, take into account any condition required and account for any reservations or allocations already promised to customers.

Further, the actual availability has to be formatted for sending to customers. Do you need a physical paper – like a pdf to print? Do you want to render the availability to send in Excel? Or do you want to have an automated API send your data to an online platform for viewing and ordering? All are considerations when thinking about how to manage your availability distribution to your customers and potential customers.

If you choose to automate your availability there are significant labor and marketing advantages to having software that, within the constraints you set, will auto publish your availability to a platform that allows direct online ordering.

This frees your staff to work on more valuable activities and gives your customer the ability to craft their own orders.

The Bottom Line

Many aspects of inventory management require software that aids you in the process.

The ability to effectively answer customer questions about inventory can improve sales and efficiency.

Key aspects of inventory location, including multiple location inventory capability, can allow you better visibility and improve labor resources.

Knowing what condition your inventory is in helps satisfy customers. Tracking existing allocations effectively helps prevent overselling, improving customer satisfaction.

Remember inventory is frozen cash so have software that helps you make the most of it.

Advanced Grower Solutions provides software that helps growers manage the many aspects of the complex inventory process.

GrowPoint is a complete inventory management and accounting software system.

Direct To Store is a cloud based, automated, sales and analytic, and replenishment platform for growers that are participating in pay by scan or vendor managed inventory programs.

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.