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- Variety Based Storage
Improves Ship Time, Efficiency
- Greenhouse owner saves hours with simple design
- By Greg Brown
Associate Editor
- All greenhouse growers are familiar with the busy time of year when the product is shipped out. Supplying product to the customer in a timely fashion, many times on short notice from the broker, adds to the challenges of the greenhouse entrepreneur.
Tony Sietsema, of T & L Farm, in Allendale, Mich. has solved the shipping conundrum for his spring bedding and basket business. He came up with his solution from a tour of a Texas grower’s operation 10 years ago.
By turning the floor of his basket production area into a storage area for shipping flats, Sietsema has reduced overtime, and shipping time disease pressure. The design also reduces some language barrier pressure for the businessman.
The solution required no computer technology just some roller conveyers and ingenuity. Setting up 100 rows of roller conveyers each holding 30 flats of plants, Sietsema has employees continually stock and restock the storage or shipping prep area with fresh flats.
Rather than sending out an employee to search out a variety of flats, Linda Sietsema, Tony’s wife, sends each individual employee to gather large numbers of the same variety, which are identified visually.
The plants are stocked in the appropriate row with like variety and color. At the bottom of the roller conveyor, Sietsema’s son-in-law, Tom Buikema, picks and pulls his order onto a conveyor to packers who prepare individual store shipments.
“Before, as the orders came in we would need to go into the greenhouse and gather the specific flowers after we received the order,” said Sietsema. The solution answers several challenges for the business.
“We sell all of our flowers through a broker, sometimes the ordering can be a little erratic. Since most of our employees are Spanish speaking people, and the wide variety of flowers that we supply, we had to find a way to get it done.
“How do you have 10 people, that need to go out into the greenhouse and get what you need when they don’t speak English and they don’t understand. We needed a visual aid, I figured, so what we did is we built a storage area.”
Employees can look at a variety and know what they are expected to retrieve. When they are not gathering specific orders, they can fill the storage system with all the different types of flowers.
The system generally requires eight stockers running around with wheelbarrows, and one person giving directions. “Then, when we don’t have orders going out, we can still stack the storage area,” said Sietsema. “When an order comes in that we need to get out quickly it is just a matter of going along the bottom conveyor end and picking out the varieties.”
Sietsema’s stocking system holds about 3,000 flats, which he says is a nice number for a three acres of greenhouse. “We grow about a hundred different varieties, and each row can represent a different variety and color,” he said.
At the bottom end of the 100 roller conveyors stands one order picker and two packers. In between shipping flats the crew works on hanging basket orders.
The storage area doubles as hanging basket production area. “We have 22,000 square feet of production space, in which we produce about 10,000 hanging baskets and still use as a storage area,” said Sietsema.
The roller beds are all adjustable, so you can control the speed that the flowers roll down the bed. With the system, one key employee can actually ship a lot of flats in a short period of time with a little help. The system has saved time and money. The crews are now dismissed every night at 5:30 p.m.; previously quitting time during the busy season could have been more like 8:30 to 9 p.m. every day, according to Sietsema.
To give the customers the service they want is a fair amount of work for the person picking the orders. That is the drawback, as the person in charge of getting the right product to the right store has to handle every flat, according to Sietsema.
The storage area is automatically watered in the evening and plants are dry by morning and ready to ship. “Once the flat gets to the age that it is saleable, we keep the problem well watered so we don’t have the problems with botrytis, because the air moves well around the table, and the foliage is always dry by the time we ship it. It answers a whole bunch of problems,” he said.
With three acres under cover, T & L supplies flats to Target stores and ships all over the Midwest. The Sietsemas have been greenhouse growers for 25 years, raising their daughters, Heidi and Heather, on the farm.
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