P van Geest supplies both high quality starting material in the fruit & vegetables sector and hydrangeas for all seasons and customers. They have been using Agriware Software for over 15 years. A main novelty for Plant nursery P. van Geest is the calculation of complete cost prices for particular production batches or sales orders in (near) real time. To do so, Agriware integrates many types of data including ERP, energy and climate data.

As a result, cost price calculation goes beyond optimization afterwards. It now can be used for day-to-day decisions, such as the acceptation of an order based on its real cost price. Or adjusting the recipe of a production batch to lower its energy costs while retaining its quality.

Young Vegetable Plants & potted Hydrangeas

Wearing white protection suits, we are getting a tour of the greenhouse by Thijs Hermans, CEO at P van Geest. Thijs shows us the extensive production area: “We have several different production locations located here in the Westland area and besides that we also rent some locations during the season. That makes that our size is in total approximately 20 hectares. As the production of young vegetable plants is not year-round we also have other activities like the production of flowering pot Hydrangeas, the germination for third parties, and also the production of young gerbera plants.”‍

Insight in production costs; energy, labor and purchasing

The Mprise Agriware client is well aware of the urgency to know exactly how the organization is performing at all times. Thijs emphasizes: “We want to have insight in our cost price and production costs. Not only afterwards but even more important: in real-time. Because then you can make your daily decisions based on data and insights. Especially in these times when prices of our production costs, such as energy costs, labor costs or purchasing costs are increasing very fast.” When asked how the plant professionals gained insights before, Thijs answers: “Actually, we always have used Excel spreadsheets where we manually had to copy-paste all sorts of data from different data sources. A lot of work and sensitive to errors.”

Horticultural producers currently lack a complete, accurate and timely insight into their costs. This limits their ability to pro-actively manage costs and it increases the risk of suboptimization.

Combine data from Agriware 365 and climate control computers

Which data sources are involved? “Agriware already gave insights in the costs of labor, purchasing and overhead costs”, explains Thijs. “But now we are able to combine these data with other important data. The energy costs are very difficult to overview. Because the usage of heat and electricity is regulated in our climate control computers and on the other hand the different tariffs of our heat and electricity components are determined in several other data sources. But with Agriware 365 we have managed to combine all data, so we are able to calculate the exact energy costs per plant.”

A real-time 360-degree cost visibility, how does that work?

Thijs Hermans: “In Agriware, the Power BI dashboard shows revenues and costs. You can refresh this standard form 24/7 to create a new insight per production batch or sales order. In our company we register every usage and tariff of labor and purchase. And in Agriware we know exactly where the production batch is located in our greenhouses. When we combine data from our climate control computers with tariff data form other data sources we are able to determine the energy usage and in doing so, the costs per plant per location.