CropTalk’s Post

Transcript

Looking at the general concept of what you do when it comes to forecasting, and I mean, there's so much to unpack there, Nadav, from forecasting, you know what you're going to yield to forecasting what your clients are going to buy to forecast. Like we've been speaking about your packaging prices to forecasting, like the quantity of each of these consumables that's going to be used. I mean, what? And it's a big question for a lot of different things, but what do you see as like the biggest challenge overall for forecasting in general, man? A great question and you know the best way for me to kind of. And the analogy I can give you is it's really about the planets aligning we have. To understand our technology, what it can do, we have to understand the market, what they, what they want. And in between those two things, it's a matter of really just finding a way where we can find a win win. The question on forecasting, I mean better suited ultimately for our VP of Sales. From my point of view, it's a matter of managing variables. The unknowns when it comes from seed to sale. So we will get information on our forecast for the year of what we expect to grow, how much we expect to grow it. And then from there we deconstruct that demand into a supply plan and an end to a crop schedule. And so where your challenges come, what I mean by variables is you know with the whole head lettuce as an example, you have a one to one ratio from seed to to plug. When it comes to herbs, you know it's multiple seats to a plug. So the tracking on the onset is the formulas have to be consistent your growing of different multiple products. So with our company in particular, we grow let's say 14 different varietals under one roof. And so you're managing an enormous amount of variables between each varietal which requires its own set points. You know they have different set points for herbs, different set points within herbs and within lattice and so. We need to manage those variables as best we can and come up with, you know, at the back end is the transition from plant spot to pound. Again, it's a whole animal in itself. So I don't know if we want to get too in the weeds there. But what the short answer to your question is, it again comes back to our team, phenomenal team that we have. Phenomenal sales and marketing team, really great partners that we work with. We're a contract grower, so we partner with Robinson Fresh, big distribution company. And so across the board, we just have really excellent partners to work with and internal team that helps us tackle this enormous challenge on forecasting. And I imagine the record keeping is just immensely important because all you can look back on. You know, you can speculate about the future, but you can look back on the past and past years and where were you at at this point and what has this crop shown us in the past? So I imagine with that stellar team, it's stellar record keeping. And so that you have this point of reference to build upon for forecasting purposes. Yeah, while also implementing a new technology, ERP systems, you know, within the world of enterprise resource management planning, NetSuite in particulars. Software that we use, it's an open source software, it engages with other softwares. And so with that we can, while we're doing the data collection currently there is the process of onboarding new technology to help us with that data collection, help us looking at historicals, using those historicals to help us forecast in the future.