From microgreens to massive growth:
How Velox helped Grow My Greens reap accuracy and efficiency gains, and supercharge their success.
Like many Kiwi businesses, Grow My Greens started out as a personal passion project for owner Catherine Hackett.
Expanding home into two commercial premises, Grow My Greens quickly built a reputation for their high quality microgreens, wholesaling to cafes and restaurants, and retailing through supermarkets and grocers.
Grow My Greens soon took on staff and moved to dedicated commercial premises, allowing them to upscale production. But before they could take their product nationwide, Catherine knew they needed to be EDI-compliant to satisfy their large retailers.
“We initially looked at Web EDI because it was the cheapest option” says Catherine, “and while it meant we ‘ticked the box’ with our customer for being EDI-enabled, it still required manual entry of orders from the Web EDI into our system, which is when mistakes happen”.
Instead, Grow My Greens opted for an end-to-end integrated EDI solution from Velox, which has seen them reap rewards they would have missed out on with Web EDI.
“We discovered so many benefits of streamlining our business by integrating our systems together, which is where the real value of EDI has been gained.” Catherine says, “EDI has become a minor part, it’s the integration and automation that has set us up for growth”.
Even a small business like Grow My Greens utilises an array of applications for accounting, CRM, ecommerce, production scheduling and freight booking. Being able to integrate them seamlessly, and eliminate manual entry, has resulted in improved accuracy, increased efficiency, and ultimately created better customer relationships.
“We take great pride in our quality, and part of that is always being dependable and professional. Velox makes us look professional, and our customers love it as we are efficient, accurate, and always on-time”, says Catherine. “We know our customers prefer suppliers that use EDI and being able to say ‘yes’ to that was great for our relationship.”
While many cloud apps have standard integrations, Catherine says Velox gives Grow My Greens a flexible, integrated solution that works exactly the way they do business.
“We have many multi-step processes that need updates into multiple applications. With Velox, each team member can just update the system they use, and all other systems are
then synced.”
Orders and updates instantly flow through to their CRM and accounting software. Velox produces their daily production sheets so the team knows what to harvest and pack, then notifies the freight provider so the trucks arrive on time. And once the orders are out the door, Velox automatically invoices their customers.
Grow My Greens have big ambitions, with plans to expand their operations around the country, and Velox is ready to grow with them.
“Velox gives us a growth platform so we can grow our customer base and order volume without compromising our quality and reliability. We can focus our team on what matters – growing microgreens – while keeping admin staff to a minimum and ensuring the same high level of service across our business, no matter how big we get”, says Catherine.
“Last month the team agreed, and we gave Velox employee of the month,” jokes Catherine.
