But you can’t turn them quick because it takes so long to load. If a nursery is shipping 40 trucks a day, it needs to churn those docks to be efficient. One of the key principles of Lean manufacturing is that a business needs to be flowing product and eliminating wasted time. “They don’t want to be there waiting for you to load.” “If they pull up to your nursery, and it takes you four or five hours to load, you’re eating into their driving time,” Cortes says.
#Stacks nursery drivers
The new E-Logs track a driver’s time more closely, and according to the laws, drivers can’t exceed 14 hours of work including drops, 11 hours of driving.
#Stacks nursery driver
Paper logs were entered manually by the truck’s driver, so it was easy to fudge or manipulate times, if a driver were so inclined. This problem has been exacerbated by the Department of Transportation’s adoption of electronic logs. “They waste a lot of time waiting for that truck to get loaded and unloaded.” “Many nurseries have told us one of their biggest difficulties is that trucking companies are not dying to work with them,” Cortes says. Time is a big problem, because trucking companies want to work with companies that make it easy for them to do their jobs.
Cortes says deck stacks offer 25-30 percent less payload capability than racks. Other growers ship plants using deck stacks, floor stacks or wooden pallets. Not every grower uses the California stack. Home Nursery was using a combination of California stack and wooden racks, depending on what exactly was being shipped. “When we do the California stack we can get a little more on the truck, but it takes longer to load and unload for the customer, and you have more damage,” says Mark Luchtefeld, vice president of sales and marketing with Home Nursery, an Albers, Ill.-based wholesale grower that began using rack loading in February. Another problem with California stacks is the toll that higher payload takes on plant quality. Some of the nurseries Cortes has helped are loading the same size truck in 30 minutes. While the payload is one and a half times more with a California stack method than racks, it typically takes four hours to load a 53-foot semi truck, with multiple people working in the trailer. He believes the solution is an optimized rack loading system, paired with the dock supermarket concept. As part of that, Cortes researched different methods as a way to optimize shipping. FlowVision focuses on finding ways to incorporate Lean Flow principles into green industry businesses. Gerson “Gary” Cortes, partner with FlowVision LLC, a green-industry consulting firm, identified shipping as an area with plenty of room for improvement for many nursery growers. Nurseries can load the most product onto a truck using this method. The advantage to this system is its unprecedented payload. This method entails stacking plant containers on top of other containers, using the rims of the pots to balance. For many growers, the “California stack” method of loading a truck is still the standard. Industry trends are driving growers to move away from “touch loads” and toward a rack loading system.
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