No one wants to start the year at a disadvantage. That’s why Swingle Lawn, Tree and Landscape Care in Denver makes sure that its trucks are loaded up with everything they need before the season even begins.
The process begins at the end of the lawn care season when they unload all of the tools and equipment from the trucks and inventory everything from truck parts to aerator parts to spray guns. Technicians repair anything and everything they can and note what needs to be replaced.
The team takes inventory seriously since it can cost the company thousands if crews aren’t properly equipped.
“You’re talking about being days, weeks behind in the timing which will put us in catchup mode throughout the entire season,” says Chris Walton, senior operations manager.
Swingle gives customers set date ranges for service in rounds. Round one routes need to be completed by the end of March because once April hits, crews have to move on to the second round of calls.
“So you really have an opportunity to lose quite a bit, I would say. In March, if we were behind at all as far as the repairs and things like that to tools and equipment, it would cost upwards of $100,000 worth of production,” Walton says.
The company uses an inventory spreadsheet with each truck listed separately by number. As everything is unloaded for the winter in December, it’s checked off the list, and everything is re-inventoried, numbered and tagged as it’s loaded up again for the season.
Throughout the service season, Swingle does inventory once a week to make sure everything is where it should be. “Sometimes we’ll have stuff that comes up missing or somebody might have tried to borrow something from another vehicle because the technicians aren’t always assigned to the same vehicle, so you may have a guy that really liked a specific spreader for whatever reason and he’ll go take it off of another truck,” Walton says. “We try to minimize that as much as possible but sometimes it does happen so we do that inventory every week.”
For items that are shared between crews like soil injectors, crews bring them back each afternoon so that they can be cleaned, inventoried and reissued the next day.
And in case something can’t be repaired right away, Swingle tries to have at least one spare for every single tool in the inventory, sometimes three or four so that they don’t get caught off guard.
“We don’t always have the manpower available to fix stuff immediately, so you’ve got to have those spares so that way you can just keep moving and then those get fixed as they can be,” Walton says.