Ideation update: stocks and prices 

We are developing Floriday together with the growers through Ideation sessions. We meet with the growers for a morning or afternoon to exchange ideas about the different functionalities to be implemented in Floriday. Last month several Ideation sessions were organised.

The flower and plant growers Raymond Vijverberg from Qualily, Paul Holstein from Holstein Flowers, Jaap Vreeken from Vreeken Bouvardia and Roy Ton from Arcadia Chrysanten participated in them. The main theme of these sessions was ‘Supply’. Supply-related matters were discussed, such as managing stocks, prices and delivery conditions.

Our greatest challenge in this theme is to develop functionalities allowing both cut flower and plant growers to work efficiently. We also want to develop functionalities that really save time. That means collecting a lot of feedback and thinking long and hard about the way in which we develop functionalities. A report of the session on supply is given here.

Stock

Stock management can take up a lot of time. Pot plant growers who want an easier life state that they do not know exactly how many products they have in stock and would prefer to avoid stock management. “The numbers do not mean anything.” They feel it is more important to be able to put a maximum limit on deliveries. This prevents major customers buying up the entire stock at once so they have to disappoint smaller but steady customers.

We responded to this with a continuous stock function. You determine whether an article is available for delivery and what is the maximum limit of an order. Orders larger than this limit are turned into customised requests.

We are also working on a day stock function. This is a functionality for growers who have products with a short(er) longevity. You can use this function to determine which articles you have daily in stock and how much you can supply. In contrast to the continuous stock function, orders of this type of stock are deducted from the quantity filled in initially. This means you can sell out, or sell stock to be delivered tomorrow or the day after.

Growers told us that it is preferable not to have to set the stock quantities from zero every day. To prevent this, we have created a function with which you can repeat the stock quantities daily or adjust them up or down.

In a later release of Floriday, we shall make it possible to transfer the remaining stock quantities from a day (or two) easily into a clock supply (EDF).

Prices

We would also like to make price management easier for growers. Maintaining the weekly lists (in FloraXchange) costs time. To help with this, we developed the functionality price groups.

Some growers employ one or two prices for all buyers all year round, and others give set discounts to buyers. Price groups will simplify the work for these growers: the grower groups buyers and sets a discount that will be implemented on the basic price which is only visible for those buyers.

Example:

Let's assume you have a group of A buyers who receive a 10% discount on articles and a group of B buyers who have a 5% discount. By entering a basic price, two prices are applied to all buyers classified into the two price groups.

In an initial version of this functionality, you still enter the price of each article per week and per dag, but that is no longer necessary for all buyers individually.

Setting fixed prices for a longer period is done less and less in the day trade. These growers enter a daily price. The Ideation growers stated that it would be great to be able to determine the price on the basis of the day before. There was also a discussion about displaying the average clock prices where you have to enter the price. We shall incorporate these valuable ideas when developing Floriday further.

Own ERP system (growers' system)

A frequently asked question is whether we are going to realise links with our own growers' systems (also called: ERP system)? That is definitely the plan! We are currently discussing the possibility with the ERP suppliers. Together with the growers we shall determine how the link should function: which functionalities will the grower use in the ERP system and which ones online in Floriday? Together with the software suppliers we are searching for the best technical realisation of this link. This is how we create Floriday together!