Case Study: Young’s Plant Farm

One thing all large-scale greenhouse growers face is the perishable nature of their products. They deal with a potentially high transaction volume and relatively low price per unit, as well as changes in market and weather conditions during the growing season.

This creates a challenge in terms of tracking inventory, managing sales orders and changes, and scheduling across and planning the entire life cycle of plants form ordering seeds, pots and soil to fulfilling orders.

Young’s Plant Farm in Auburn, Ala., had been dealing with these problems and sought a way to overcome them. A family-run business that started in 1961 in Gene Young’s 1,500-square-foot backyard greenhouse, the company now boasts a 1.5-million-square-foot greenhouse and 40 acres of outside growing area that supplies ornamental plants to big-box retailers in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and northern Florida.

“To remain competitive in today’s market, we rely on mechanization, innovation, and technology as well as partnering with other successful companies to help us become more efficient and our customers more profitable,” said Bryan Young, general manager of Young’s Plant Farm.

In 2009, Young’s partnered with Practical Software Solutions to implement Sage ERP MAS 500 and Grower Vertical, a module geared toward the specific needs of the horticulture industry. A Sage Silver Development Partner, Practical Software Solutions teamed with Metrolina Greenhouses in Huntersville, N.C., to create Grower Vertical two years earlier. The project was so successful that Metrolina earned the Sage Customer Award for Best Use of Customization in 2008.

“We knew coming in that MAS 500 was customizable, and Grower Vertical was presented to us as a product born out of the original version,” Young said. “This gave us the ability to customize the product even further to help us find solutions we needed to address in our day-to-day operations.”

It was an obvious choice for Young’s to implement Sage ERP MAS 500 as an integrated system to tie all of their departments together. Before the installation, they had been using individual Excel spreadsheets, outdated software, and it was difficult for their managers to get information in a timely manner. But it was the ability to customize the product that allowed Young’s to deal with changes in one of their retailer’s UPC system.

“The needs of big-box retailers change all the time,” Young said. “From EDI tools down to shipping and normal financials, MAS 500’s flexibility allowed us to adjust our processes as the needs of our big-box retailers change.”

One of Young’s big-box retailers expanded their UPC system to give unique codes to plant varieties and colors. For example, the retailer used to have one UPC for a 4-inch annual pot. Now, the retailer has more than 20 UPCs for a 4-inch annual pot, down to the variety, and on some items, down to the color detail.

“Because these changes increased our UPC tagging system to more than what we could keep up with manually, we needed a new scanning system,” Young said. “With the ability to customize MAS 500 even further, we were able to come up with the solution for our UPC codes.”

Young’s worked with Practical Software Solutions to create a new technology that rebuilds sales orders and generates all the shipping orders, documents and labels as the product is loaded onto the truck. This is done with the use of mobile devices and bar code technology. Scan by Cart is now available as an add-on to the Grower Vertical module.

“Bryan Young came up with the solution to the problem,” said Greg Lafferty, senior account executive with Practical Software Solutions. “He came to me and said, ‘There has got to be a way to solve this. Can’t we just … ’ and he described the solution he envisioned. We refined it, but he engineered the whole thing.”

The results of the new technology were immediate. Scan by Cart has reduced Young’s customer receipt errors to less than 1 percent, according to Young.

“This is vitally important because it solves a problem that has plagued the industry,” Young said. “In traditional manufacturing, items shipped in error can be returned and put back on the shelves for the next order. In the horticultural industry, if the product is wrong, our customers will collect a charge-back fee on top of not paying for the product we already shipped. The product is not returnable because it’s a live product and instantly becomes waste.”

The solution paid off in other ways, too. Young’s was honored with the Sage Customer Award for Innovation in 2011 for developing Scan by Cart.

Practical Software Solutions is a Sage Authorized Partner. For more information about Sage ERP MAS 500 and Grower Vertical, contact Greg Lafferty at 704-721-6800 ext. 3019 or glafferty@practicalsoftwaresolutions.com.