Operation: A regional seed producer and processor operating a conditioning and treatment facility and two regional distribution warehouses. Industry: Row crop seed production, conditioning, treatment, and distribution. Prior environment: Business Central in use for core financials and basic inventory; the physical warehouse ran on paper pick tickets, spreadsheets, and location knowledge held by longtime staff. Engagement scope: Advanced warehousing across all locations, bins and zones, lot and expiration tracking, license plating, scanner-based receiving through shipping. Timeline: Delivered ahead of the spring shipping season, the company’s highest-volume and least flexible deadline of the year.
The challenge
The company’s seed business runs on a calendar it doesn’t control: seed is conditioned and treated over the winter and shipped in a narrow window ahead of spring planting. Missing that window isn’t a delay that gets absorbed the following month, it’s a season’s worth of sales at risk. Each lot of seed carried information that mattered beyond the item number: which field it was harvested from, which treatment batch it passed through, its germination test percentage, and the date it was no longer viable to sell. None of that lived in the ERP. It lived in spreadsheets, on tags stapled to pallets, and in the memory of staff who’d worked the warehouse for a decade or more. During shipping season, when temporary seasonal workers made up a large share of the staff, that tribal knowledge wasn’t something the company could depend on.
The approach
TruNova assessed the warehouse operation against Business Central’s advanced warehousing functionality, location by location. Bins and zones were configured separately for raw seed, treated seed awaiting quality release, and packaged, ship-ready inventory, with a hold status built into the bin structure so lots awaiting a germination retest couldn’t be picked by mistake. Lot tracking captured variety, treatment batch, and germination test date at receipt, enforcing first-expired, first-out picking automatically. License plating was implemented at the pallet level, so a full pallet could be received, put away, picked, and shipped by scanning a single license plate rather than counting bags at every touch. Barcode scanners were deployed at receiving, put-away, picking, packing, and shipping stations at all three locations, replacing paper pick tickets with scanner-directed tasks.
Results
- Lot, treatment batch, and germination retest data tracked at the bin level across all three locations, with first-expired, first-out picking enforced automatically.
- Pallets received, put away, picked, and shipped by scanning a single license plate instead of manual bag counts at every touch.
- Full lot traceability from harvest lot through treatment batch to shipped pallet, cutting trace time for a germination retest or dealer question to a single lookup.
- Warehouse tasks directed by scanner rather than paper pick tickets, reducing dependence on any one worker’s memory of the layout.
- Spring shipping season completed on schedule, with seasonal hires needing only a short onboarding to work the floor.
Next step
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