|
Also in this issue...
01 |
02 |
03 |
04 |
05 |
06 |
07 |
08 |
09 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
Featured Companies
|
|
|
Disciplined Efficiency
| Jennifer Polanz
|
 
|
|
|
>> Published Date: 12/27/2012
|
|
|
It’s easy to say automation leads to efficiency, which leads to reduced costs. But there’s a lot more that goes into reducing labor hours and creating better processes, all while not overspending on automation.
Recently, Matt Gold, president of Gold Hill Nursery in Hillsboro, Oregon, (a wholesale producer of container-grown topiaries, woody ornamentals, fruit and flowering trees and more) explained how his company worked through ways to become more efficient—and it didn’t start with just buying equipment.
“Our first trip to Europe was in 2001, and we saw a lot of things there that really impressed us, so we started implementing ideas we saw there,” he says. “In 2006 we really sat down and put together a master plan to implement equipment to increase quality and reduce production hours.”
Matt adds that visiting nurseries in Europe and the United States helped identify where their inefficiencies were in their own operation. Once they homed in on where those inefficiencies were, they pinpointed which equipment would reduce them the most and began with the low-lying fruit.
“We use a fork lift, but instead of using a regular pallet fork we use modified forks—they’re really big pitch forks,” Matt explains. “We initially had them custom-made, but these last iterations we’ve made ourselves. They are made by local manufacturers.
“It really fascinated us; typically a person can pick up four 1-gallon plants in each hand. You get pretty tired, hustling to keep up with the cutting crew on the other end. With the forks you can pick up 160 and take them out to the field, on a potting crew you can take out two levels, so 320.”
Automation was added incrementally to tackle labor-heavy activities like spacing pots, trimming, transporting from the potting line and loading trucks. The automation included conveyer belts, the aforementioned customized forks and automated trimmers, among other items. All told, with the increased automation and laborsaving processes mapped out in the 5-year master plan, Gold Hill Nursery reduced labor by 27,000 hours (from 117,000 hours in 2006 to 90,000 hours in 2011) and saved $1 million in production costs. They continue to work toward the ultimate goal of 76,000 hours.
The automation helped so much, in fact, that Gold Hill branched out to create a separate automation company called Midas Nursery Solutions in 2009, which offers U.S. businesses a wide variety of products designed to make nurseries leaner.
And speaking of lean, that’s also part of the Gold Hill plan. Members of management there have been participating in the Oregon Association of Nurseries’ Lean Consortium. The consortium includes several area nurseries getting hands-on training on lean processes.
“We’re still purchasing equipment to automate, but most of that is done. We’ll refine that, but mostly we’re looking at human power to refine the process and make it better quality,” Matt says. “We want to reduce wasted steps that don’t add value to our customers. We want to develop a culture in our nursery where that continuous improvement is always being sustained.
“We’re kind of early on in it; this is our second year with the training. We feel we have a lot to learn and develop.”
And all of this isn’t going on in a vacuum, either. Since Gold Hill began implementing the master plan, it expanded size-wise to increase production. The challenge was to increase production while decreasing labor.
“We had a goal in hours to get to, but also a goal of hours per acre,” he explains. “That number was growing, so we looked at how much and, even though we were expanding production, we wanted to reduce hours.”
Over that five-year time period, Gold Hill’s hours-per-acre dropped 52%, while the average wage went up $4.61. Best of all, quality improved during that time-frame, which means the company never sacrificed the core business values while improving
efficiency.
Those at the nursery continue to strive for greater efficiency to be able to meet their customers’ needs effectively. “A customer is only going to pay for what they perceive as value; the rest is waste,” Matt adds. “You pay for that, not the customer. It’s all about understating what your customer perceives as value and capitalizing on that.” GP
|
|
© Copyright 2001 - 2013 Ball Publishing —
|
|
|
|
|