Tesselaar

An efficient back-office was in order for Paul Tesselaar.

Who is the customer?

Tesselaar Nursery is a long-standing mail order business who sells plants, bulbs, and perennials, and is also home to the popular annual Tulip Festival. Their Managing Director is Paul Tesselaar - a guy who knows his plants and his business inside out.

OnePoint: a back-office application.

The job at hand was to create operational efficiency for the business. The company ran on a range of systems developed over ten or more years, coupled with some very complicated spreadsheets that were unwieldy to use and maintain. Paul wanted to make things simpler and more cost effective.

We produced an operations application that allowed management of customers, orders, stock levels, and dispatch. Sounds simple, but there is a lot under the hood.

How did we go about it?

First up, we paid a visit to the Tulip Festival and the Nursery, to see how Tesselaar worked. Once we were done tip-toeing, Paul walked us through his business functions end-to-end. We learned all about their needs for stock ordering, forecasting and inventory management; picking, plant treatment, packing and shipping; customer service, invoicing and payments. We mapped out how things currently worked, and asked lots of questions to find out what mattered most.

Over the coming months, we completed the design and development of a Ruby on Rails application that Tesselaar call "OnePoint". We focused on designs that suited the nature of Paul’s workforce - for instance that some are older and less technology savvy, or that some have specialised roles and then busy periods are dealt with by casual workers. We mixed technologies that suited how each main function worked - e.g. combining iPad interfaces, online interfaces, and barcode scanners to make each step as efficient as possible.

A hairy challenge.

One of the most unique problems faced by Tesselaar was that the product (i.e., plants) ... die. They can perish at any point in their journey - potentially once ordered but while still in the ground before they even reach Tesselaar, in storage or on the shelves waiting to be shipped. That meant the stock management solution had to take this into account, and leave doors open to easily correct inventory levels along the way. It also meant that the application had to be smart about how to determine when stock should be say removed from cool storage and packaged on the shelf as product ready to ship. The relationship between customer orders and forecasts of typical season behaviour to what the baggers were instructed to pack were vital in this.

Did it work?

We’re waiting to see. Paul is picking his moment between seasons to switch to his new application. We’re bound to need to refine some of the rules that determine what stock to pack, or tweak how the packing production line operates to make it efficient for workers. Overall though, the early feedback of the trials by Paul’s team are promising. We’ll be sure to report back.

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Tulip Love.

We got down in the detail of products.

2011-10-05T03:20:28Z, Warren from Cogent said

Can’t wait to see this working in the wild.

Waz & Ben figure out how to predict what needs to be packed.

2011-10-07T03:20:28Z, Andy from Cogent said

Dotland and Stockland are bending my brain.

Swipey swipey.

Thread

Helping Melbourne Business School to be leaders in digital learning.

Eventer

Changing what it’s like to watch an event you couldn’t make it to.

We are bright and good at what we do

That means we’ll ask lots of questions.

We don’t think about our skills as buzzwords like strategy, user experience, agile methods or Ruby on Rails development — we think about working as a team with your objective in mind.

We relish the challenge of creating something new, and to solve tough problems that haven’t been solved before. We know that designing something that is efficient to run matters too, that’s why we’re also happy to be your ongoing support team.

We’ve been fortunate to work with some great customers, like:

Melbourne Business School
The Alfred Hospital
Real Estate Group
Tesselaar
Rezeko
Sensis Yellow Pages
Swann Insurance
Lonely Planet
Jetstar