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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