Forgive me if this has been asked here before, but I wanted to check in and see how other folks are handling this issue.
As we all know, pricing and availability of materials is constantly changing, which makes catalog management tough. We especially see this with plants. We have several vendors we work with, but we’re rarely ever able to get a comprehensive price/availability list from them to tell us what they do/don’t have and at what price, we basically have to verify price and availability on a bid by bid basis because their inventory changes so much. This makes keeping a comprehensive plant catalog at all seem like a waste of time, and we could just add every plant as a one time item.
The reasons we’d want to have a comprehensive plant catalog is so that we can autokit all of our plants so that they automatically include labor and fert. Ideally, a comprehensive catalog should also speed up the sales cycle and improve estimate accuracy, but if we don’t have an up to date picture of actual plant availability or cost, can’t keep the catalog accurate and we can’t autokit in advance in the catalog.
I’ve heard of some folks using more generic plant item names like “Premium Perennial” or “Standard Perennial” and making kits including those items in all pot sizes with an estimated average purchase cost (usually on the higher side, just in case a pricier substitute is needed later down the road), specifying varieties and details for the customer in the scope descriptions and then leveraging Estimator Notes in the Item Detail screen to specify variety and details for the procurement piece. Does anyone do this, and how does it work for you?
The pros I can think of for using this strategy, is that the generic nature of the Item would allow our Sales staff to not have to necessarily worry about getting vendor quotes ahead of time, because the purchase cost *should* cover the cost of any plant in that category at that size, and then our Operations team can take the budget provided by the generic item, and find the best place to purchase the plants at the best price without having to take a specific vendor’s pricing and availability into consideration.
The concerns I have with going this route is that our sales staff would have more manual entry to do on every estimate by having to put Estimator Notes in for every plant item, and, those notes aren’t (at least to my knowledge) visible anywhere else but as a column in Purchasing Assistant, and would not be visible on an actual Purchase Receipt, unless they were typed into the notes box. I’m not the best at Web Report Designer, but in my poking around, I don’t see Estimator Notes as an available field to add to a PR layout. That renders the presence of those notes as moot when our staff uses either a printed PR or the materials list Aspire Mobile to check over a delivery to make sure everything is correct and present before accepting it, or going to purchase plants from a vendor for a job.
How do you all manage your plant catalogs?
