This Seed company boosted profitability by 150% after making one change

“Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before”

— Franz Kafka

In the last blog we explored the challenges that many seed growing and distribution companies are facing today.

In this blog, we are going to look at how some of these challenges affect productivity and why businesses in the seed industry would benefit from fewer systems to look after.

Having worked with many Seed growing and distribution companies we have learned how complicated these businesses are to manage. With the complexities of multiple seed lots and batch numbers, ensuring that stock matches up to purchase orders and sales orders is critical for productivity.

Dealing with scattered information

Scattered information about each seed becomes difficult to manage, especially when the seed has been blended or subject to various treatments. It is very time consuming when recording and retrieving information manually across various systems and spreadsheets.

Being able to maintain control over lot numbers and batch numbers in one system has a huge productivity advantage for the business, particularly when all the information relating to the seed lot number stays with the seed — despite being subject to blends or treatments. Streamlining information in this way provides full traceability and ease of compliance that a manual process cannot provide. In addition, finance is consistently updated accurately with real time batch and stock information across purchase orders, invoices, receipts and billing.

The impact of having a single system to manage

From our experience, we have found that businesses who are maintaining multiple spreadsheets and systems waste a lot of time trying to find the right information when they need it. Having the information in one system provided one of our customers become more efficient and gain a 150% increase in profitability.

If your data is in multiple locations, it is likely that:

• There is a lot of wasted time and effort getting the right information at the right time, especially if information is in numerous locations, including lot information in paper files.
• There are risks of errors caused by manual processes and having to rekey information across multiple systems.
• It is difficult to gain an accurate insight on stock availability and price information.

Click here to read the benefits gained by one particular major UK seed company, and watch out for our next blog which looks at making eCommerce work for you effectively and more ideas about productivity.