At Forever Plants we continuously seek the balance between “data driven” enterprise, “gut feeling” and attention for the people we work with. Thinking in terms of data is firmly baked into our DNA and provides a form of control and substantiation when making decisions. We use data both when making major strategic decisions and when optimising the smallest daily processes. But how exactly do we do that? In this article you will read all about it!
A clear overview with a Datagreenhouse
Having a lot of data from various systems is not that complicated. It only becomes tricky when you want to overlay this data in order to draw smart overviews and analyses from it. To simplify this process and really be able to optimise our processes, at the end of last year we started building our own Datagreenhouse (data warehouse).
Our Datagreenhouse now contains the data from our commercial software package and our planning/budgeting package. Later on we will also add the data sets from our labour registration, bookkeeping and more.
Collaboration with Gibbs Rotterdam
To gain a good overview from the datagreenhouse, we work together with Gibbs, an analytical consultancy firm from Rotterdam. Gibbs helps us present the data more clearly by creating certain dashboards, analyses and algorithms. Previously we made our dashboards manually. As you can imagine, this involved quite a lot of work. With the current dashboards we have the same overview, but within a shorter time! That automation and simplification is enormously handy for all of our colleagues.
But make no mistake: it is only after creating the overview that things become really interesting. Based on analyses and algorithms we make predictive calculations to genuinely make smarter choices from our data. Concretely, we are currently carrying out two projects in that regard that help us optimise our processes. Project 1 is an inventory dashboard, project 2 is a labour dashboard.
The inventory dashboard
The inventory dashboard is intended to ultimately serve our customers better. It consists of a relationship between our forecasted sales figures from the planning package, the recorded long-term orders and an advanced forecast of the short-term sales. With this dashboard we can better manage our available inventory, in order to deploy it as optimally as possible when serving our customers.
The labour dashboard
The labour dashboard is intended to increase involvement and insight on the shop floor. As you may already know, we have long been working to involve our employees in the entire business operation. Good insight into the state of affairs is therefore important for everyone.
At the basis of the labour dashboard system lies our weekly work planning in the nursery. For each workstation it is made visible which tasks have to be carried out in a week and on a day. The current performance is also presented, and based on the daily planning we have insight into the expected finishing time of that day. With this we create a great deal of insight into the planning to be completed for all colleagues on the floor. This ensures considerably more involvement – and ultimately increased enjoyment at work too.
Working smarter thanks to insight into data
All in all we are therefore busy with all kinds of data – and above all how we can deploy this data as optimally as possible. The inventory dashboard and labour dashboard are the first two projects, but with them we are only at the beginning of the ever smarter things we want to achieve with our data. Would you like to know more about our end goal or the new dashboards? Then by all means get in touch with Thom (thom@foreverplants.nl), he will be more than happy to tell you more about it!
