Value for our customers

Just like any other product you buy regularly you are always looking for better value for money when you buy house plants. We want to continually improve the way we produce plants so that we can offer you better value for money every day.

To help with this aim since 2003 we have started to find ways to adapt the best practice from the automotive industry to our situation. Since the 1950's the Japanese automotive industry developed a system that has become known as Lean Manufacturing.

The essential factors you will find in all lean organisations are:

1. Decisions about productive work are taken at the lowest possible level in the organisation. This puts actions in the hands of the people who know most about the process and frees management time for forward planning and strategic improvement.

2. Mechanisms that make any product quality or waste issue very obvious as soon as it happens and systems that result in a rapid action to eliminate the cause of the problem.

It takes many years to reach these ideals and they key things we have achieved so far to improve the value we offer to customers are:

Housekeeping

Set high standards of house keeping around the nursery.
This has meant that it is obvious when any tools or stock are missing or out of place.

Ideas

Started an ideas scheme and encouraged everyone to write down anything they have found to be wasteful, difficult, dangerous or just inconvenient about their work.
This generated over 10 great ideas per week many of which are put into practice by the team in the relevant area.
We have done training to help everyone to recognise the "seven wastes" and to spark ideas on how to reduce them.
We also present prizes each month as recognition and thanks for the ideas voted the best. You can see the latest awards on the 'Awards' page.

Standard Operating Procedures

Written down the correct way to do each job and displayed it in the work area. We then make sure everyone works in the same way.
This makes it easier to track down the causes of any quality issues. Then we can change the procedure if necessary to eliminate them.

Maintenance

We have begun to record each time we waste time or cause quality issues due to a machine breakdown.
This means we can plan preventative maintenance to reduce breakdowns and waste.

Sharing Knowledge

These changes in the way we work are already helping us to stop our costs rising and generating some interest from other businesses on the south coast. As a result we have been asked by the Manufacturing Advisory Service (MAS) to become a host for their Onsite Insights Scheme.

Click here to see the video of our orchid production