Keep Your Material Deliveries Organized

It's officially April, and as the weather warms up the pace of projects is picking up too. The daffodils are blooming, Tulips aren't far behind, and we got our first big plant delivery for installation projects last Wednesday.

We've made huge improvements to our plant purchasing process, that have streamlined that work to the point where we've been able to shift our team members to work on other projects instead. There are three key ways we've done it:

1. We primarily use SiteOne and Landscape Hub for ordering materials. By consolidating where we are ordering materials from, we're able to simplify the ordering process. These two companies make it easy for us: we're able to rely on their expertise if any substitutions are needed, they consolidate deliveries for us, and we're able to have our costs updated in Aspire so that our job costing is as accurate as possible.

2.  We pick delivery days. We only accept plant material delivery on Wednesdays to make sure that we have enough team members on hand to help with unloading and organizing the plant yard and to allow those team members to work uninterrupted on other days of the week.

3. We use our systems and a process to keep us organized. We can pick a delivery day each week and order almost all of our materials online because we're organized on the front end. We rely on Aspire for this, and for plant material, the process looks like this:

1. A job is sold, and the work ticket that lists all materials needed is sent to production for scheduling. 
2. A team member reviews the schedule for the next 2 weeks and puts all plant material needs into a single purchase order. 
3. The Grunder Landscaping team communicates with LandscapeHub about any substitutions that may be needed and confirms the shipping and delivery date.
4. On Wednesdays, GLC schedules the right number of team members to be in the yard when delivery is expected. 
5. Plants are tagged by job and organized in the plant yard for easy loading when the job begins. 

Before this process, we had two team members spending the majority of their time managing material purchasing and organizing deliveries. Now, those team members are able to spend their valuable time on other tasks. As you look at your organization, are your purchasing processes more difficult than they need to be? Look for ways to streamline them. 

The only way to make it through Spring is to work smarter, not harder. Hit the ground running this week, I'll talk to you next Sunday!

Marty Grunder
President & CEO
The Grow Group & Grunder Landscaping Co.