Horticulture export · Diagnostic
A diagnostic across three farms, and what it recovered.
Location
Sector · Service
9% spoilage reduction · 7% export logistics cost reduction · 100 issues diagnosed
The situation
A B Corp certified premium horticulture exporter, shipping to the EU and the Middle East, was losing margin fast. Revenue was 12% below budget and profit before tax 42% below target. Production losses were running at 29.7%: nearly one stem in three never reached a customer. To make matters worse, errors in the ERP data meant nobody could trust the numbers behind decisions, so the arguments about what to fix went round in circles.
What I did
I ran an end-to-end diagnostic across seven functions: strategy, finance, operations, packhouse, production, sales and commercial. I reviewed sixteen source datasets and checked them against each other until they could be trusted. I also observed the flow from harvest to dispatch on site, following the product rather than the report.
In total I diagnosed one hundred issues, each ranked with the money at stake against it. Eight were flagged as critical and put in front of the leadership team for immediate action. To keep progress visible, I set up a weekly operating routine around ten core measures, each with a named owner and a trigger for action when it went out of line.
What changed
Spoilage came down by 9%, and export logistics cost came down by 7%. Just as important, the business now had numbers it could trust and a weekly rhythm for acting on them.