Humphris Nursery

Background

Humphris Nursery is a large production nursery, located in Mooroolbark Victoria and has come a long way in 103 years. Established by Ern Bennett in 1879, the business has been cared for by three generations of the Humphris family. Still family owned and operated, the nursery grows and distributes an extensive range of high quality plants for customers throughout Australia.

Licensing agreements allows Humphris to grow the very best in a new wave of PBR plants being bred all over the world. The company also has a strong commitment to their our own research and development and has been involved in the Nursery Industry Accreditations Scheme Australia (NIASA) since its inception.

The company has incorporated water re-use and recycling facilities incorporated with wetlands that are environmentally friendly and economically viable.

The Challenge

Growing over 400 separate plant lines on 10 hectares, managing a propagation facility with 45 employees, 29 vehicles and distributing over 2 million plants annually requires careful attention to detail.

Daily operations were essentially paper driven and it was difficult for sales and management staff to retrieve critical information when dealing with customers. Management of research & development and licensing agreements was another aspect that was dealt with separately and staff were looking for a centralised system that provided up to the minute information.

Humphris were also looking for an integrated system that controlled the work flow within the 3 major divisions: propagation, tubing and potting.

According to Kate Davies the biggest challenge was finding ERP software that was flexible enough to handle all the variables in a nursery operation. Prior to Accentis, two accounting packages (MYOB and Quickbooks) were used to manage different segments of the business, but neither of these was particularly useful for the production department.

Solution

The Accentis Enterprise system was installed on their server and allows any approved staff to access information. One of the major benefits has been the ability of inventory items within the system to have multiple bills of material. This has allowed the company to more accurately monitor raw material usage and minimize wastage levels.

Actual profit and loss detail is available for any plant groups at any time throughout the growing process. This has given management much more insight into the viability of any growing and marketing activities.

“Package price was also a determining factor in choosing Accentis. After looking at numerous other systems, nothing came close to Accentis in terms of flexibility and scalability” Kate Davies said “Some other packages were 3 times the price and were very rigid in structure so we are very satisfied with our choice”|

In order to better manage plant and equipment Humphris intend to add the Fixed Assets functionality in the near future.

• Success Stories

  Read how one Accentis client saved 26% annually, during the first 2 years of using the software.

  

• Humphris Nursery reclaims financial control with Accentis.