The village of Forrest Hill has less than 500 citizens, yet is home to more than 60 commercial nurseries, most of which are large, wholesale/retail operations representing the culmination of multi-generation family endeavors. The typical Forrest Hill nursery encompasses business functions ranging from production to warehousing to direct wholesale and retail sales to multi-state wholesale distribution. From the raw materials of plastic pots, soil, seeds, water, land, cooperative climate, minimal machinery and ample labor, these nurseries produce, mature, store and distribute their perishable inventory, and most perform each of these steps in much the same way their grandparents did.
As a rule, seeds are germinated and then the seedlings are transferred to unlabeled plastic pots within which they mature until ready for sale. While the plants are too young to be identified by any but the most experienced nursers, they’re family, genus and species are communicated solely by grouping on the ground. Although these nurseries stock hundreds of varieties in up to 10 different container sizes each, typically, none of these plants/containers are identified with a printed barcode, or even a text label.
Customers – both wholesale and retail – drive along the plant groupings, selecting and loading what they intend to purchase. If a customer loads plants, changes her mind, and then misplaces them in another group – oh well. If the single hand-scribbled label that identifies each grouping becomes illegible, is obscured or is lost altogether, most customers will be unable to tell pre-bloom George Tabors from the Southern Charms. If a customer calls to ask whether the nursery has 100 three-gallon George Tabor azaleas in stock, the office calls the field supervisor who sends an employee to that area of the nursery to physically count how many of that item are on the ground – each and every time a customer inquires.
hese are often relatively high-volume operations with annual unit sales in the hundreds of thousands to millions. Although these nurseries scream for the benefits of barcoding, most have resisted the innovation because their in-field production sites are so remote from their office facilities where stationary barcode printers would traditionally be located. Preprinting container labels and then carrying them into the field for application to containers as seedlings are transferred to pots is problematic for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the high likelihood of mislabeling, but equipping crew chiefs with Zebra Technologies’ wireless mobile barcode printers networked to hand-held mobile computers answers each and every one of these challenges, with the potential of literally revolutionizing these old-school enterprises.
Because Forrest Hill’s technology-resistant commercial nurseries represent an extreme end of the range of applications within which Zebra’s wireless mobile printers have the potential for introducing drastic efficiency gains to challenging logistics operations, it’s easy to see how mobile printers would benefit them. While the potential efficiency and accuracy gains may not be as bluntly clear in your more technically advanced enterprise, that does not mean that they are not there… just awaiting your discovery.