8/13/2023 0 Comments Pioneer landscape centers![]() ![]() With Pioneer OS we’ll be able to operate more efficiently and see our performance in real-time, supporting our underlying business philosophy of “a day’s work in a day.” Soon, we’ll be launching an industry-leading e-commerce system, something we couldn’t previously do, that will allow our customers to see stock availability on their smartphone, schedule a delivery and make payment at any time, day or night, without any human contact whatsoever. Now, our stores use one system, which integrates in real-time with our enterprise management system and transportation management system. We call it Pioneer OS, and the intent was to digitize and automate multiple systems and processes into a single, unified system. ![]() ![]() We basically started from scratch, creating an entire platform to hold all our systems together. This will help to unlock latent capacity across our fleet, allowing us to reduce our transportation spend by as much as $6 million annually, or grow sales by $20 million with zero incremental cost. In addition, our drivers are routed, stop-by-stop, in the most efficient manner possible. With Pioneer OS, we’re now able to meet our delivery promise to customers because the system determines the right truck for the delivery and the right route that truck should follow. That’s especially problematic when you consider that we spend over $52 million a year on transport, half of which relates to third-party logistics providers that we use heavily during the busy seasons. As a result, customers weren’t getting their deliveries when they needed them, and our trucks weren’t being routed efficiently. Drivers would then look at the schedule and change the order of deliveries to accommodate what they thought would work best. The dispatch spreadsheets were also being edited by multiple people across the business, each of whom would assign priority to their own jobs, often with limited context as to what else the truck might be doing that day. Every cell in the worksheet represented a two-hour block, but the delivery might take 47 minutes, 1 hour and 32 minutes, or more. Before we built and deployed Pioneer OS, we manually dispatched our trucks using Excel spreadsheets. It was obvious that things weren’t working, so we had to think differently. Our employees endured massive amounts of stress, and our company had massive turnover. When I came to Pioneer, there were layers and layers of workarounds slapped onto existing systems and processes, yet little had been done to address root causes or deploy new ways of working. None of our systems were integrated, the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing and any time there was a problem, people would simply put sticky tape and band-aids on broken or non-existent processes – praying it held together. We were operating mostly with manual processes. What prompted Pioneer’s investment in technology? In dialogue with Paul Tudor, President of Pioneer Landscape Centers Here’s how this employer of 600+ turned a non-tech retail operation into a high-tech service-based organization. The company does this with systems far more advanced than those used by similar firms, and about 80 percent of these systems were developed in-house in eighteen short months. Pioneer sells services that ensure its stores have the products customers need while allowing those same customers to get in and out of the store – fast. At its very core, Pioneer sells distribution services that ensure no contractor’s crew is waiting on a job site, shovels in hand, ready to move rocks that are still on a truck miles away. Today, Pioneer leaders and employees alike understand that the company doesn’t simply sell rock. Neither employees nor their key customers – landscaping professionals – were particularly high-tech. Before Tudor took the helm, Pioneer’s leaders and employees saw themselves as folks who sold rock, mostly to landscape contractors. Once they did, this new vision of the company served as the foundation for transformative innovation, with unwavering focus on employees and the customer. When he joined the firm in 2019, he challenged his leadership team and the employees they support to see the business differently. In the smaller world of Pioneer Landscape Centers, a regional supplier of landscape and hardscape materials, the same could be said of company President Paul Tudor. Each of these iconic figures made their mark on the world and changed their respective fields by thinking differently, by seeing and pursuing possibilities others had not pursued. From there, you’re just solving problems.”ĭo you remember the old Apple Computer ad campaign that ran under the slogan, “Think different?” It featured that memorable (and ungrammatical) tagline attached to pictures of legendary creative thinkers and leaders, including Einstein, Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison and more. ![]() “Innovation is a deep understanding of your customers, your employees, and your business. ![]()
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