As per a research published in a recent article written by – Xinhua, it is stated that the Kenyan flower sector is experiencing a high cost of labor, energy, and farm. These are some of the major challenges currently faced by the sector. Because of these challenges, many organizations have also planned to reduce the headcount and some of the organizations have planned to shut down their farms.
Not just this, other reasons such as climate change, drop in rainfall and others are also some of the reasons why Kenya flower farm industry is facing a crisis. Team Faber Infinite has been helping farms in Africa with its proven Farm Operational Transformation Toolkit from Organizational Transformation Framework© by Faber Infinite Consulting to sustain in the market with lesser production cost and more profits.
We have been working with leading flower farms in Africa and helped them get over issues such as:
- Low Land and Labour productivity
- High manpower cost
- Issues related to water
- High Inventory
- High rejection rate
We have helped farms reduce costs by improving productivity. We have worked on both field productivity as well as packhouse productivity. Field productivity was improved by the implementation of standard work and elimination of non-value adding activities. Packhouse productivity was improved by redesigning the packhouse layout and workstation design.
Another burning issue in farms is a high rejection rate. Team Faber Infinite has helped farms reduce the rejection rate by more than 35% in the field as well as packhouses by the implementation of quality management toolkit.
To balance the cost factor, many organizations that are not optimized, have either overstocked or understocked inventory, blocked their capital cashflow and have started reducing the headcounts in the farm to balance their operating costs. Due to certain policies, many farms are facing challenges for inventory management of fertilizers and chemicals. As a result, farms were stocking a lot of inventory, resulting in cash flow problems. Team Faber Infinite has helped farms maintain optimum inventory, with the implementation of inventory management toolkit by Faber Infinite.
All these initiatives have helped the client increase the overall production and reduce the cost per stem by more than 25%.
Another concern that the farms in Africa are facing apart from the cost issue is water. Because of the irregular rain patterns, the farms are facing issues with irrigation. This leads to improper growth of flowers, which causes an increment in the rejection rate.
Also, due to the unavailability of proper resources of water in the country, many organizations are planning to shut the farms. In situations like these, Team Faber has helped organizations devise and implement strategies to save water in order to run and sustain the business. We have helped organizations identify ways to conserve water in every possible way. We have also helped them improve their irrigation, which can lead to the healthy growth of flowers and thus reduce or nullify the rejections rates.
In situations like these, team Faber with its specially designed and proven framework for Farm Transformation has helped many leading flower farms across Africa to maintain a balance between the cost of production and manpower without reducing headcount. Team Faber has been helping farms improve productivity per person in the packhouse, reduce wastage of water, optimize inventory, reduce rejections to name a few.
Some of the results delivered at various client farms include:
- 25% improvement in flower production
- 83% improvement in the value-adding ratio
- 45% reduction in lead time in the packhouse
- 39% improvement in harvest productivity
- 47% improvement in manpower productivity for packhouse
- 53% reduction in inventory carrying cost
Team Faber has been persistently working towards building competitiveness in farms. We have been helping clients embark on the journey of continual improvement and organizational transformation for business excellence. The same can be done for your farms as well. Contact us at consulting@faberinfinite.com to know-how!
Read below to know more about how Team Faber Infinite has been helping and supporting transformation in farms:
We would like to thank our Organization Transformation expert Mr.Vishal Singh for sharing his valuable insights on issues faced in commercial flower farms in Africa.
We sincerely appreciate his efforts in helping us come up with this informative article that will help numerous commercial flower farms across geographies.
Written & Compiled by Faber Priyal Shah
