Behind the scenes: Shipping and freight
When we talk about the nurseries, our focus is usually on the plants we grow, but we wouldn’t get very far without the shipping and logistics part of the process. Our Shipping Managers, Justin Pond in Garden Prairie and Autumn Scott in Kenosha, have been routing trucks and overseeing shipping for several years now. A big part of their jobs is figuring out how to get all of our deliveries loaded and shipped out to our customers in the most efficient and fastest way possible, all while ensuring that the plants arrive at their destination in the same quality that they left the nursery.
A lot has changed with our shipping processes here at Mariani Plants over the years; in 2008 we only had one box truck in Garden Prairie and a semi in Kenosha. Back then, all of our plants were floor-stacked. In 2009 when we started growing perennials in GP, we added a second truck with shipping racks to protect the quality of the perennials during transit. In 2010, we transitioned to soft-sided trucks and developed custom-built racks to accommodate our perennials and container shrubs. Today, GP has five box trucks and Kenosha has two semis, and in May of this year our fleet averaged over 10,000 miles per week.
When we first started, we used a paper calendar to coordinate all our deliveries, but we have since developed a shared Outlook calendar system used by our Kenosha and Garden Prairie staff. When a sales representative schedules a delivery of plants coming out of Garden Prairie or Kenosha, they enter it on the calendar and send an email to the appropriate group of inventory managers. Orders are pulled the day before delivery, and Monday orders are usually pulled the prior Saturday. Orders are loaded onto the trucks the night before delivery to allow drivers time to make their first deliveries and return to be reloaded for a second run, if possible. We also shuttle plants back and forth between Kenosha and Garden Prairie to allow customers to pick up plants from the location closest to them, and to ship plants from both locations all on the same truck when feasible.
We are fortunate to have a group of extremely hard-working individuals on our order-pulling crew. They are often here before 6:00 in the morning to start pulling orders for that day’s pick- ups and the next day’s deliveries, and most times they are still here after everyone else leaves.
Since orders are not pulled until the day before a delivery, we have a lot of flexibility with changes to orders, and the order pulling crew is often being given changes to an order during the pulling process and even after the order has been pulled. Some of the members of our Garden Prairie order-pulling crew have been here since the inception of the nursery, and they have practically gotten the process of pulling orders down to a science.
We pride ourselves on our quick service when it comes to shipping. It takes a lot of cooperation between our sales staff, inventory managers, and pulling crew, but we do everything we can to get orders out when it works best for our customers all while maintaining the quality of the plants.
