Getting orders in order

SchillA simple conversation with its nursery has allowed Schill Grounds Maintenance to streamline its plant ordering and delivery process, saving the company thousands of dollars.

Schill brings in $6.2 million a year from commercial maintenance, snow management and high-end design/build with 60 employees. Based in suburban Cleveland, the company has been working with nearby Willoway Nurseries for 16 years, and gets almost all of its container plants there. They spent $150,000 there last year, and, in a good year, can spend as much as $500,000.

“It was a convenient local relationship to start out, but they have worked with us probably way more than they needed to to make us happy,” says Vice President Jerry Schill. “They certainly offer solutions.”

Those solutions, he says, include a personable distribution center manager who, along with his staff, is proactive in asking Schill what he needs and if there are additional services the nursery could provide.

“It’s become more and more of a necessity over the last couple of years. We’ve leaned out our operation. We don’t have a plant procurement person, which we did three years ago,” Schill says. Cutting that position alone has saved the company a $50,000 annual salary, plus benefits. The savings in time and fuel from streamlining the ordering and delivery system streamlined is harder to calculate, but Schill says it’s been good for business.

“They’ve made life on us a lot easier,” he says. “They leaned out their operation, too. They got rid of things that weren’t winners in the marketplace. They’re very finicky on the quality of stuff they are keeping, and the material they do have is in much better shape. They’re not sending us (a shrub) that’s sheared into a ball or a birthday candle. They understand our expectations, which makes life a lot easier.”

How It's Set Up
A few years ago, Schill met with Willoway to set up a streamlined system. He explained the quality of plant material he was looking for, especially for the company’s high-end residential installations. Now, Schill’s team has access to Willoway’s electronic inventory database, and can find out quickly if a plant their designers specified isn’t available, or doesn’t meet their stringent quality requirements.

 “(We need) multiple pieces of the same plant, we need size matches, width matches,” Schill says. “The material has to have continuity.”

A week before Schill needs the material, Willoway’s assistant operations manager sends over customized tickets – “plant faxes” – that include the client’s name, material specified and purchase order number.

“They go through those lists, and if there will be any availability issues, they tell us,” Schill says. “They send us digital pictures on our phones if they’re not happy with the quality.”

Larger orders are delivered directly to the job site. Smaller ones come to Schill’s facility already organized and tagged by client. Matching tags are attached to the plant faxes, and all the material is staged and ready to go out the door.

With Willoway handling the drop-off, the nursery is now in charge of auditing its own deliveries – and picking up wrong orders – which saves Schill even more time.

“They will come to the job site and do the counts. They’re catching a lot of that stuff downstream,” he says. “It truly is a partnership, because the better we look, the better they look.”

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The author is editor of Lawn & Landscape.