A plant nursery: 4,800 stock lines across four sites in one view
A plant nursery group in Devon was running inventory across four sites with four separate stock systems. The managing director called it "four businesses that happened to share a name".
The reading
Four nursery sites across Devon and Cornwall, roughly 4,800 live stock lines across the group, 62 staff. The firm grew about 60% of its own stock and bought in the remainder. Each site had grown up with its own stock system: two on a long-discontinued horticultural package, one on Excel, one on a card index.
The trade counter at each site could tell a landscape customer what was in stock at that site. It could not reliably tell them what was in stock elsewhere in the group. Transfers between sites were arranged by phone and often arrived too late or in wrong quantities.
The managing director's complaint was that she could not answer, for her own board, how many of a particular rose cultivar the group held. She had to ring four sites and add up.
Four systems, one group
The four systems were not the problem in themselves; each worked, for its own site. The problem was that the group had never had a group-level view. Buying was done site-by-site, which meant the firm sometimes bought in a plant from a wholesaler whilst holding a surplus at another site forty miles away.
The growers had developed their own informal network, phoning each other on Thursdays. It worked for the plants the growers remembered to call about.
- 4 sites, 4 stock systems, 1 group
- 4,800 live stock lines, no shared SKU convention
- Weekly inter-site transfers arranged by phone
- Occasional purchase of stock already held at a sister site
- No group-level view for buying or reporting
What we built
We built a group inventory service that read from all four site systems, mapped the various local SKUs to a canonical plant identifier, and presented a unified view. The trade counters saw the group stock; the growers saw where their stock had gone; the buyer saw whether to buy or transfer.
The technical detail worth recording: the canonical plant identifier was Latin-name-based, with cultivar as a secondary key. We considered using a horticultural standard but found none that matched the group's actual catalogue well; the growers had been using Latin names in conversation for decades and the canonical identifier felt natural to them. Local common-name mappings were preserved per site, so the trade counter in Totnes still printed "Mexican Orange Blossom" on the ticket.
Stack: a Node service doing nightly syncs, Postgres for the canonical catalogue, Metabase for buyer reporting, a web view for the trade counters.
The numbers at ninety days
| What | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Group-level stock query response | 1-2 hours | 3 sec |
| Duplicate purchases per quarter | 14 | 1 |
| Inter-site transfer accuracy | 78% | 96% |
| Trade counter cross-site referrals | Rare | 23/week |
| Buyer time on manual stock lookups | 9 hr/week | 1 hr/week |
The group becomes a group
The managing director's framing had been correct: the firm had been four businesses sharing a name. After the integration, it began to behave as a group, with buying leverage, transferable stock, and a defensible answer to the board's questions.
The system-first point is modest here but worth stating. The four site systems were not replaced; they continued to serve their own counters as they always had. The group simply gained a system of its own, which it had never previously possessed.