About the Company

Cottage Gardens, Inc. is a wholesale nursery with more than 1500 poly-houses stretched across 750 acres in Ohio and Michigan. They provide over 200 varieties of retail-ready plants to garden centers and large customers, such as Lowe’s, Meijers, and Franks. These plants are custom-tagged, and can be unloaded, un-sleeved, and sold directly to the end-customer, resulting in a quicker turnover and profits for the retailer.

The Challenge

Each season, Cottage Gardens receives several staged orders from Lowe’s. Typically, these consist of a ten to twelve page spreadsheet. Previously, each stage of an order required manual entry into Cottage Gardens’ MAS 200 system, and the re-keying of the same data into their Sterling Commerce Gentran system. This meant entering the SKU number, UPC code and price for each item ordered, one item at a time, into both systems. A typical Lowe’s order is for 155 stores, with each store receiving a dozen different varieties of plants. That equates to nearly 1,000 data points that someone at Cottage Gardens had to manually enter for one Lowe’s order! This daunting task typically took two people working full-time three days to complete.

The Solution

Don Smith of Centerprise Information Advisors, Cottage Gardens’ authorized MAS 200 reseller, installed TrueCommerce IntegratorTM. Working with an Implementation Specialist from the TrueCommerce Professional Services team, Don was able to integrate Cottage Gardens’ EDI transactions with their MAS 200 system, eliminating the need to manually key data. The results have been dramatic. According to Sheryl Tischer from Cottage Gardens, “Integrator is a wonderful product. We can now do what used to take us three days in just ten minutes. It works beautifully! Now I can spend my time on the phone selling products.” Besides the substantial increase in efficiency, Cottage Gardens has also realized a 50% savings on their monthly networking costs by using TC.Net.
The Results

  • Time required to process orders reduced from days to minutes
  • A 50% reduction in monthly networking costs