Are You Ready For Spring 2016?–Availability Update 2-29-16

Hello everyone,

It’s been a while since we posted. I hope you all are doing well and are ready for a great spring. Here’s a quick update on what we have been doing. If you don’t really care just scroll down. The pictures are at the bottom.

New Software

I have been very busy implementing our new sales/inventory/AR program. We stayed with the same company that had provided our previous program. The old program was just that – old. The new program is called Plant Partner Enterprise from Starcom.

Enterprise has been around for about a decade but had previously been focused on the needs of growers larger than us and plug/liner suppliers. The new program has a lot of new features that were added to meet the needs of smaller growers like us. Enterprise has its pros and cons. I can’t really predict how well the program will perform. It’s really too early to tell plus since we are not used to it yet. We are slow at doing some things. Once we get rolling heavy in a few weeks, I hope that we will see some improvements in our processes and speed things up a little.

An Advance Apology

I want to thank you in advance for you patience. We will most likely have some sort of tech issue that will cause us to not be able to do something on a busy week this spring. Hopefully, these hiccups will be easily resolved or minor enough that you will not even know they happened. But if you are the one who has to wait until we fix something, I am sorry you had to wait and thanks again for your patience.

Online Availability – I’m working on it…

We are still working on the online availability. It might even be working by the end of the day today. The programmer who is handling that emailed me late last night and told me were were “10 seconds from being done.” I provided him the additional information he asked for at 8:15 am this morning and have not heard back from him. I don’t know when I am supposed to start counting done the 10 seconds to be done.

I will post an update here if we get the online availability working today.

The online availability will feature 2 parts – a pdf you can print or download and a column webpage layout. On the webpage you can search for specific items and also download the inventory as a .CSV file that you can enter your order into and email back to us. Please let us know if you have any questions about how to do this once we get it in place.

Additionally we are building a excel order spreadsheet that we can upload in seconds. This works well for customers submitting orders for multiple locations but can also be used by one location customers which most of you are.

Again if you have any questions about the availabilities or any of the new things we are working on or want to change the way you are ordering all you have to do is ask and we will do our best to make sure we can meet your needs.

New Items

You can see the list and pictures of all our new items here. Leigh Ann really spread out here Peace Farm Organics line and you can see that list here.

There was a seed availability problem with Burgundy Velour Wave Petunias and Red Velour Wave Petunias. We had some seed left over from last year and were able to get some more in this spring. We are going to be short on both colors in new 306’s as well as #6 and baskets this year. Several of our mix Wave Petunia baskets had these colors in them so we had to either sub another color or plant more mono-colored baskets.

We pared down our combo lists in baskets and decos. We kept the ones that did well and added in new Confetti Gardens. Kwik Kombos and Trixi combos.

We a few more adds and drops. You can see the whole list on our New Items page so be sure to check it out.

Pictures

1G Hardy Ferns