Planning your nursery staff & operations

Labour costs can often be more then 50 percent of the cost price of a plant. What is the best way to allocate these costly workers and improve competitiveness? If managed correctly, re-directing resources to handle shortages or re-arranging the sequence of activities can lower costs, reduce waste, shorten cycle time and accelerate delivery times. These are often the difference between making a profit or a loss. Hortibench has a range of buiult in operations to which you can add your own ones. During the season you will employ a certain amount of labour to fulfil your growing plan. This amount is of course related to the amount of plants you grow. To allow a precise calculation, HortiBench lets you link certain activities to the growing information of a species. For instance to grow a species you will need a certain amount of hours of potting, an amount of hours of spacing, plant care, watering etc. With your plant amounts of the production schedule HortiBench can with a click of the button calculate for you how much labour you will need during the weeks of the season. HortiBench even allows you to categorise these different activities into groups. So you can group the hours into for instance skilled, non-skilled, or plant-technical labour.

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Task Lists per worker or Team Leader

The Task List shows all the operations to be carried out on the nursery for a day or for the week.You can dole out these Tasks to individual staff members or give the list to the Team Leader who can instruct people on the floor however he sees fit.

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Daily or Weekly Task Rosters

If you have allocated all the operations to individual staff members you can simply print off their daily or weekly calendar with all their operations neatly arranged. It show exactly which Operation, on which Batch and how many plants have to be done.

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Actual Time Spent with the Track & Trace Module

With the additional Track & trace module you can register the actual time spent on each Task. This can be done on paper or with a mobile device. each worker can have HortiBench on their smartphone and simply click the time clock when they finished a Task and see what the next Task is.