Information about the company and the project
Boryna is a family company that has been in business for over 30 years. It combines advisory services with comprehensive supply of articles indispensable to run modern plantations. Thanks to e-commerce sales, it ensures their products are available all over the territory of Poland. Boryna shares its experience through educational projects for soft fruit planters. The company also manages a research and development station and a nursery garden that deals with selecting and multiplying licensed plant cuttings.
The company has 10 tunnels with soft fruit plants, open plantations and 9 separate warehouses, including a cold store. The company offers 15.000 products on sale, which includes, among others, plant cuttings, fertilisers, plant protection products, equipment and sprinkler systems. The company’s nursery garden has already yielded over a million of licensed plant cuttings, while the experts of the research and development station have tested 25 cultivars of raspberries, strawberries and blackberries.
Joanna Borzęcka – Head of e-commerce
Boryna is a family business. The business started with my parents who established the company in nineteen ninety five. At present, the company employs 50 persons. We deal with sales and advisory services for gardeners and farmers. We specialize in cultivation of soft fruit plants. Apart from sales, advisory services have always been important for us, as they were expected by our clients.
WMS system implementation
Its intensive development induced the company to modernize its warehousing logistics. We chose the Qguar WMS system, to be integrated with our ERP system. Qguar WMS supports retail sales, wholesale and e-commerce tasks. It manages the diversified structure of storage and aids distribution. This is another step in the development of the company, taken out of concern for our clients’ comfort.
Joanna Borzęcka – Head of e-commerce
In a sense, we were forced to invest in the WMS system by 2 departments, namely the e-commerce department, whose dynamic development required us to streamline warehouse operation, and the wholesale department, that required article production dates and batch numbers to be recorded. The decision was also influenced by the seasonality of our branch of trade, which is very pronounced.
Deliveries
Goods supplied to Boryna are transported to respective warehouses. Some of the pallets are unpacked and specific articles are dispatched to split-case picking zones. Delivery acceptance tasks are enhanced with automatic identification and wireless terminals that accelerate works performance and eliminate errors. Optimum allocation of warehousing locations is managed by Qguar WMS, which optimizes location usage and effectiveness of goods picking process.
Shop and laboratory
Our brick-and-mortar store provides goods to local planters. The store offers a wide assortment of goods adapted to seasonal demand, as well as advisory services provided by sales assistants. Thanks to Qguar WMS and its integration with our ERP system, goods are instantaneously transported from our warehouses to our clients. Free-of-charge microscopic examinations of plants constitute an exceptional assistance service for planters. Analyses of supplied samples allow us to determine the causes of potential plant diseases. Sufficiently early identification of pathogens may help prevent considerable damages to plantations.
E-commerce shipments
A part of shipments in the Boryna company is realized in the whole-sale mode. However, thanks to our Internet shop at wPolu.pl that has gained high customer trust, the e-commerce has become the fastest-growing distribution channel. It is here that the power of the WMS system is most conspicuous. Clients’ orders from the ERP system are transformed into picking orders in Qguar WMS. The majority of e-commerce shipments are processed collectively by means of special carts and containers.
The picking process commences with the assignment of a group of orders to an operator who also collects a cart and containers to perform the task. The WMS system, by means of a wireless terminal, directs the operator to specific warehousing locations, where he simultaneously picks articles identified in multiple orders and confirms successive steps of the process with a scanner. Picked items are directed to the packing zone, where they are inserted into cartons that receive shipping labels. The cartons ready to be shipped are transported via a system of conveyors to the station, where shipment pallets are prepared. The pallets will be waiting for couriers.
Adam Bartosiewicz – Head of IT
Intensive development of e-commerce in recent years has also been observed in the Boryna company. Unfortunately, e-commerce involves a large number of orders requiring short processing times, which forces us to automate and digitalize these processes as much as possible, because we want to dispatch ordered goods to clients as soon as possible. WMS fulfils this specific function. It automates the logistic processes, especially those involved in e-commerce orders that require short realization times.
Collaboration on the project
The success of this project resulted from intensive cooperation and flexible approach to the challenges faced by our line of trade. The diversified assortment of goods and varying distribution models required certain adaptations in the WMS system. The experience gathered by Quantum in hundreds of investment projects ensured efficient implementation of the WMS system, while taking advantage of its full potential.
Adam Bartosiewicz – Head of IT
When determining tasks to be performed in the WMS system, we had to, on the one hand, consider the capabilities of the WMS system itself, which we had not been very familiar with yet, while on the other hand, we had to take the capabilities of our ERP system into consideration, so as to combine both into one well functioning ecosystem. WMS turned out to be a very flexible solution. Together with the Quantum company, we managed to implement it in different logistic domains within our company. The system lived up to our expectations.
Joanna Borzęcka – Head of e-commerce
In the beginning, it seemed to us that we would not need so advanced systems as WMS. It turned out, however, that we did. In order to compete in the European and world markets, Polish companies must invest in new technologies. This plantation is a good example. Now it looks just like those in the West of Europe.
The future of the company
Intensive development of the company and the need to meet market demands determine the next objectives for Boryna. The crucial mainstay of the strategy consists in developing a modern, licensed strawberry nursery and handing the management of plant cuttings logistics over to the Qguar system. This skilful combination of the line-of-trade know-how with IT technologies allows the company to unfailingly deliver products of the highest quality to its clients.
Adam Bartosiewicz – Head of IT
The Boryna company is such a combination of IT with a plantation. On the one hand, agriculture is our domain, but on the other hand, this is not traditional agriculture, as its is highly digitalized. We do not stop at this point, content with what we have got. We keep pushing our development further.
Joanna Borzęcka – Head of e-commerce
We surely plan to develop the sale of strawberry cuttings, while simultaneously pushing to acquire new clients in the soft fruit sector, in which we have become an expert in Poland. We encourage farmers to establish soft fruit plantations. If you want to produce fruit of the highest quality, this type of plantations constitute an unavoidable investment.
Podsumowanie
Boryna proves that Polish companies measure up to the state-of-the art farming solutions in Europe and the Qguar system supports this success. We wish the company success in its further development and we wish numerous planters the possibility of taking advantage of the know-how and experience of our client.