The
Company
Faddegon’s Nursery, Inc., is a successful 100-person
business with three related but diverse divisions.
It is also a company that knows what it was like to “wander
in the dark” and now be able to see clearly where
it is going.
Faddegon’s retail
division sells all the things
that you would expect to find in a traditional retail
nursery: plants, plant material, gardening tools, and
so forth. But it also has considerable sales in non-traditional
items such as collectibles, jewelry, and lamps. In
fact, there are 12,000 separate items on the shelves
in Faddegon’s retail division.
The landscape
contracting division does landscaping for individuals and businesses. This
division issues
estimates and work orders for jobs, needs to track
costs (such as time and materials) and change orders,
and then must invoice the completed jobs.
The indoor
plant maintenance division handles the installation and maintenance of
tropical plants in
malls and offices.
The 25 people who work in this division need to
keep track of recurring billing, contract expiration
and
renewal and planned replacements for some 400 different
contracts.
Before EXEControl
“
Before 1990, we ran our business basically by the seat
of our pants,” says Joan Graves, Secretary/Treasurer,
of Faddegon’s nursery. “We were very much
wandering in the dark as to the actual status of our
business. We never knew with any precision what we
had in inventory or how profitable a contract job was.”
In 1990, Faddegon’s installed a Xenix system
with a primitive network. “It took care of basic
accounting functions,” Graves says, “but
little else. We still had no inventory control and
no point of sales interface.”
She adds, “Even worse, financial statements were
extremely slow, often trailing by as much as four months.
When we closed the books at the end of the year, we
would be hard-pressed to get our taxes filed by April
15.”
The delay in getting financial information
also had more serious consequences. “We do 30% of our
retail nursery business in the month of May. If we
can’t tell what is selling and what’s not
selling, we are essentially flying blind,” Graves
said.
After EXEControl
In 1995, when Faddegon’s found that their existing
system could not add any additional printers or terminals,
the company decided to install EXEControl from Ebeling
Associates.
“It was a difficult transition at first,” Graves
says, “because we are not particularly computer
savvy. We needed some serious handholding, and Ebeling
Associates supplied it. In addition, when we found
that a particular function wasn’t quite what
we expected or needed, the folks from Ebeling said, ‘Okay,
we’ll fix it,’ and they did.”
She adds, “The impact of EXEControl on our operations
has been extraordinary. Across all divisions, financial
control is just marvelous. We can run profit and loss
statements at any point in the month and know where
we are.”
Retail Division
In the retail division, EXEControl has given Faddegon’s
a much better handle on inventory. “I can print
a report and see if we’re about to run out of
some critical item during our busy time,” Graves
says. “I can also see if a particular item is
not moving and decide if we need to put it on sale.”
The Ebeling system also
gives the retail division very powerful tools for controlling
pricing. Items can be
put on sale by product line, by vendor, by market code,
or individual item. Items can also have special pricing
by virtue of the nature of the customer. Employees,
for example, get a discount, and Faddegon’s Preferred
Customer program gives certain customers advantageous
pricing on selected items. Sales discounts can be structured
by percentage off, dollars off, or quantity. EXEControl
makes it easy to execute pricing changes that instantly
appear at the point of sale registers.
The system has also allowed Graves to become much
more sophisticated in her marketing. “With the Preferred
Customer cards, which identify people individually,
and the point of sale system, I can tell who is buying
what, and I can do data mining and create special offers
from that” Graves says. For example, preferred
customers who purchased roses last year might be direct-mailed
a special offer on a new variety of roses.
Contract Landscaping Division
In the contract landscaping division, EXEControl records
crew members’ time, helps generate estimates
and work orders, and even creates picking lists for
materials to be used on a particular job. The biggest
impact, however, has been on cash flow. Previously,
the billing of a contract landscaping job might be
delayed 30-60 days, at which time both the customer’s
and the crew foreman’s memories may have gotten
a little hazy. But with the estimating and change order
capabilities built into EXEControl, most contract landscaping
jobs are billing within 10 days of completing a job.
Indoor Plant Maintenance Division
In the indoor plant maintenance division, recurring
billing is handled within a couple of hours each month,
thanks to the Ebeling Associates system. Contracts
and renewals are sent out in a timely manner and priced
to reflect increased expenses where appropriate.
Summary
The upshot is that any time it is desired, Faddegon’s
Nursery, Inc. can get a clear, timely, and concise
picture of how the company as a whole or any division
is doing. “The capacity of the system is beyond
what I imagined,” Graves says. “I’m
still discovering what it can do.”
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