Pulling Orders Timeline

We very often get asked, “What’s taking so long to pull the order?”

The facility is 75 acres, and although you may be ordering 3–4 items, they may be located on completely opposite sides of the nursery. We understand the question, because many customers never leave the loading dock area.

Here’s an example of a customer placing an order for 20–25 each of five different trees, totaling 150 #5 trees.

At first glance, that may not sound like a large order. However, those five varieties could be spread across multiple growing areas, requiring crews and equipment to travel significant distances throughout the nursery. In many cases, the plants are not sitting next to the loading dock ready to go — they are actively growing in production blocks across the property.

In addition, every order must be located, counted, quality checked, loaded safely, and sometimes reorganized to fit properly on the customer’s trailer or truck. If an order contains plants from several departments, multiple crew members may be involved before the order is complete (such as a forklift operator to lift and place large trees into the trailer).

However today, we have a simple order of 150 #5s that are located on just half of the facility, and we used Strava app to record their path from start to finish: 

Start Time : 1:58 P.M.
Driving Time : 9 minutes 50 seconds
Loading the order onto trailers : 19 minutes, 10 seconds.
End Time  : 2:27 P.M.
Total Time : 29 minutes
Driving Distance : 1.25 miles

This was 29 minutes simply to pull the order up to the customer. At this point, we still had not started final loading, securing shade cloth to protect the plants during transport, or tying down the load for travel.

Unfortunately, there was one additional hiccup.

We cannot stress enough the importance of arriving with enough trailer space to comfortably load your entire order. While this timing example only covered pulling 150 #5 trees, there were also larger specimen trees tagged and scheduled to be loaded as part of the same order. However, due to a large 36" pipe already occupying significant trailer space, the complete order may not fit as easy as we hope. 

2:46pm, 21 minutes later, all 150 #5 actually fit in the bed of the pickup, although a bit tight. Meanwhile a second crew is starting to find the trees picked out by the customer.


2:59pm, the pipe has been moved and the first of the trees arrive, in the middle of the shade cloth being secured over the #5s


3:12 p.m., 4 #45 Live Oaks and 5 #30 Live Oaks are now loaded.


3:14 the first  #95 Live Oak is being loaded



3:16 the second #95 Live Oak is being loaded

3:18 the third and final #95 is now loaded, and the shade cloth needs to now go on the trailer.

3:20 Shadecloth is now covering the trees, now begins the tie down process.
3:32, everything is tied down and secure, and time to enjoy a peaceful drive down I-35 construction zone.
Going back, start time of handing the tags off to the loading crew was 1:58 P.M, and rolling out is 3:32 P.M. 1 hour, 34 minutes with a crew of 4 people and a forklift. All trees were selected from the drip line at the office, which did speed up the process. Otherwise, it would be a safe assumption that another 30 minutes would be needed to bring the trees from another corner of the nursery.