Customer stories


Willoway Nurseries, Inc.

Ohio-based wholesale nursery tracks every step in the process of growing plant stock with a system of FileMaker Pro databases.

The wide variety of plants on sale at your favorite local garden supply outlet don’t just sprout out of nowhere—most likely they’re the result of hard work and concerted effort by a dedicated wholesale nursery. Willoway Nurseries of Avon, Ohio is a prime example, supplying approximately 1700 varieties of plants to garden centers and landscapers throughout the East and Midwest. Willoway specializes in woody ornamental plants, trees, and perennials, but can also supply annuals, mums, and poinsettias. Spread out over a thousand acres, the nursery incorporates a number of individual farms. About 160 people work for the company full-time, but during peak growing season, that number more than doubles.


Business challenges

The nursery business isn’t just a matter of plant the seeds and hope for the best. Every step is carefully monitored, carefully documented, and statistically projected for maximum yield. “We got into FileMaker Pro originally because we wanted to track the plants that die or are damaged, or for whatever reason have to be thrown away,” explains database administrator Dan White. “In order to track this ‘scrap,’ we were using an Excel spreadsheet, but that quickly became unwieldy because of the number of different plants and different varieties of plants, and the difficulty we encountered in generating reports.”

In addition to the basic problem of tracking scrap, Willoway needed an effective system for collecting and collating vital information on the growing process itself—what steps were necessary for each variety of plant grown, what methods proved most effective in producing healthy, hardy stock. “All that information had been tracked in different binders in different departments,” White recalls, “and nobody knew what anyone else was doing, and things were getting missed, things weren’t getting ordered on time. They wanted a way to get all this information into an easily accessed, centralized location.”


Successful solution

Beginning with a simple system for tracking scrap, the Willoway FileMaker Pro database system has grown to a company-wide application following stock through every step in the growing process, from seed to sale. “We have approximately 40 users on the system,” White notes, “ and soon there’ll be nearly 50. Our FileMaker Pro system walks the user through the whole process. Each year we have a production meeting where all the managers get together and decide what to grow for the next year. We enter those numbers into FileMaker Pro, along with the number of plants we expect to die. FileMaker Pro will take the number of plants you want to end up with, calculate the survivability rate, and then tell you how many you need to buy or propagate.”

FileMaker Pro tracks plant purchases company-wide. “The purchasing supervisor can log in and check to see how many plants he’ll get,” White continues. “FileMaker Pro will generate a purchase order for the specified vendor, and print it out. When the plants come in they get logged into the system as ‘received,’ and from that point plants are tracked throughout the system for their entire life. Adjustments are made when plants die, when they’re scrapped, and when they get to a salable size. Once the plant’s sold, it’s handed back to FileMaker for our shipping department, which takes all the orders and allows the sales representative to group the orders into loads, group the loads into trucks, calculate the freight, assign each truck to a dock, and show you where each truck is going.”

Willoway’s Avon farm is tied into the main FileMaker Pro system, with other outlying farms accessing the database through local systems that are updated either daily or every two days depending on demand. The system presently consists of about 13 individual database files containing approximately 30,000 records but when full implementation of FileMaker Pro 7 is completed the databases will be condensed down to two.


"FileMaker Pro 7 will run a lot faster in a network environment, and the improved tools in FileMaker Pro 7 are just unbelievable."

Dan White, database administrator, Willoway Nurseries


Customer benefits

With the current system, Willoway Nurseries enjoys fast, efficient inventory management, on a companywide scale. Reliable projections for each growing season can be made with ease, and plants are easily followed through every stage of growth, processing and finished state. But even greater benefits lie ahead once FileMaker Pro 7 is fully deployed. “The improved relational features are going to do two things for us,” White anticipates. “One will be to save time since finding complicated sets of data can now be done through relationships instead of through a query. Second, FileMaker Pro 7 will allow us to stop ‘pipelining’ data. We won’t have to take information from the grandchildren, send it to the children, and back to the parents—with FileMaker Pro 7 we can just take any field from the related database and drop it directly into the layout for the parent.”

White also anticipates greatly enhanced user speed. “FileMaker Pro 7 will run a lot faster in a network environment,” he predicts, “and the improved tools in FileMaker Pro 7 are just unbelievable. For example, when tracking shipping it took five fields per truck in FileMaker Pro 6, over sixty different shipping locations. That required me to create 300 fields in order to show all the information. Because of the new capabilities in FileMaker Pro 7, I can now accomplish the same thing using just 64 fields. There are numerous things about FileMaker Pro 7 that made it a huge improvement over previous versions.”



Contact information

Contact Info for Customer:

Dan White
Database Administrator
Willoway Nurseries, Inc.
440-934-4435
dan@willowaynurseries.com
www.willowaynurseries.com


Filemaker Contact:

Kevin Mallon
Public Relations Manager
FileMaker Inc.
408-987-7227
kevin_mallon@filemaker.com
http://www.filemaker.com


Overview
  • Wholesale nursery provides over 1700 varieties of plant stock to independent garden centers and landscapers throughout the East and Midwest.
  • Based in Avon, OH.
  • Approximately 160 fulltime employees (rising to 400 on seasonal basis).
Industry
  • Information Technology
  • Retail/Wholesale
  • Small Business
Solutions
  • Company-wide FileMaker Pro database allows the tracking of every individual plant grown, from seed to sale.
Benefits
  • Reliable projections of seasonal yield are easily made through FileMaker Pro database calculations.
  • Detailed reports are generated for each farm or for any specific department.
  • Complete information on any product shipment is immediately accessible.