News » 18.06.2025 - What do growers need for effective inventory management?
Recent research by Plantform shows that inventory management is still a major challenge among growers. As a software specialist active in the sector for many years, I still have the same conversations with growers about this topic as I did 15 years ago. So what makes this so difficult? In this blog by William van Loenen, it is explained what the real challenge is and how it can be solved.
Why manage inventory?
Inventory management is not an end goal in itself but a means to streamline your organization. In practice, effective inventory management often involves being predictable and reliable for your customers and providing consistent and reliable information to your employees. Additionally, it requires ensuring that you sell what you have in stock and avoid selling items that are not available, thereby aligning sales with actual inventory levels.
In addition to operational benefits, there are financial reasons for maintaining well-organized inventory. Proper inventory management aids in the accurate valuation of inventory and work in progress, ensuring that financial statements reflect true asset values. It also allows for precise cost price calculations based on actual costs, including fluctuating expenses such as energy. Furthermore, it supports margin calculation on a per-order basis by considering the costs associated with specific production batches, ultimately contributing to better financial decision-making and profitability.
What is needed for proper inventory management?
Inventory management is quite a broad concept and involves many aspects. Even before the plants are in the greenhouse, you plan inventory based on demand. That is where inventory planning begins. Then, of course, things do not go as planned. You may produce more or less, use a replacement variety, be a week later, experience plant loss, have differences in growth time, and so on.
To gain reliable insight into your inventory management, it is essential to plan with expected deviations and accurately record actual outcomes. This process ensures clarity in both availability and financial value. Controlling certain variables is crucial in both the planning stage and actual operations. These variables include germination, loss, growth time, seasonal influences, uneven growth, and product characteristics. By effectively managing these factors, you can better align your planning with reality, thereby enhancing both operational efficiency and financial accuracy.
The real problem
With a good software package, planning inventory and availability is well arranged. From the production plan, insight into planned availability follows automatically, including all variables.
The difficulty begins in execution. Ideally, you should record all deviations from the plan in order to create an adjusted plan. But then I hear, "We are not administrators." And that is exactly the problem. To get better insights, you not only need a good system, but you also need to collect more data about the actual situation in the greenhouse. But that is easier said than done. We want less work, not more. So the question is, how can you collect the most reliable information possible with the least amount of effort—for your controller and your sales team?
Five ways to register reality
Connect your planning to greenhouse automation
Do you use a sowing machine, potting line, or automatic container system? Connect these systems to your planning. Based on actual quantities, the planning can automatically be recalculated for the remaining crop cycle.
Register quantities with an app
If machine integration is not possible, you can provide the operator with a simple app to enter the number of sown, potted, or transplanted plants. This is a straightforward task, especially if the app is in the operator's native language. Plant movements can also be registered this way: scan the batch, scan the new location, done.
Manual registration during greenhouse walks
A greenhouse walk is often done to assess batches and the planned delivery week. A simple app can help here too. Think of adjusting the delivery week, marking a batch (or part of it) as ready, or registering losses. By entering this directly into the system, the sales team has immediate insight into the latest figures.
Automatic registration during greenhouse walks
Automation can also play a role here. Companies like Track32 and Corvus are increasingly able to count inventory and assess maturity. Let a drone fly regularly or mount a camera on the boom to automatically process the current status in your planning.
Delivery registration
So far, we have talked about inventory, but at some point, it needs to be delivered. A recurring pain point is tracking how much of which batch has been delivered and for which sales order.
If the inventory has already been registered during cultivation, the system knows where the plants are. Based on the picking order, the system can determine which plants need to be picked, according to the order lines and customer requirements. Once the picking is confirmed, the inventory is automatically deducted from the assigned batch.
This way, you have insight into current inventory and can calculate margins per order, since the cost price of the delivered plants is known.
Source: www.floraldaily.com
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