Production had a whiteboard
Finance had a tool for bidding and billing. Sales had a tool for estimates and invoicing. Production, the work between Monday morning and Friday’s last route, ran on the production manager’s experience, sticky notes and flat hours in a spreadsheet.
Every good production manager is already running simulations in their head: what happens with one more crew member, one less mower, a wet Tuesday. At Terry’s Landscape, CrewPlanner became the place to run those simulations out loud.
One property, bid at 210 hours
The property was bid at 210 hours and ran on three-day maintenance cycles. Terry’s modeled the labor load in CrewPlanner, crew member by crew member and machine by machine.
The production manager’s change was small. Add one crew member a day and one blower. The maintenance cycle dropped from three days to two, and the maintenance itself came to 99 hours.
The judgment was right. The plan made it exact.
The buffer is capacity
The gap between 210 and 99 is not waste. Every operator needs room for rain delays, seasonal surges and the specialty services on the contract. The problem is not having the buffer. It is not knowing it is there, or how big it is.
At Terry’s, the roughly 110 hours went to aeration, pruning, seeding and the other specialty services already sold on the property.
Sixteen properties, eleven crew changes
Terry’s analyzed 16 properties the same way. On 11 of them, the plan pointed to a different crew size than the one running the property.
The week, before it happens
The same model answers the questions that come up every week, before the trucks leave the yard:
- Wet turf. When conditions slow production, see how the hours shift across the route before the rain hits.
- Equipment down. Take a mower or trimmer out of the plan and see what it does to the whole route.
- Crew callout. When someone calls out, see which properties move and where capacity gets tight, and decide before 7 a.m.
- Specialty work. Layer in aeration, pruning or seeding and see where overtime starts and where capacity still holds.
For the owner, and for the production manager
For the owner, the capacity was inside the contract the whole time. The property was bid at 210 hours and the maintenance takes 99. That is room for the specialty work already being sold, and now it shows up as a number.
For the production manager, it is proof of what they already knew. One crew member and one blower turned three days into two. The Monday meeting starts with the answer instead of a guess.
