Bart is currently a student Business Administration at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He is also a member of the student association Laurentius where he helped organizing the 20th Lustrum for half a year. After his internship he probably wants to continue with his masters Supply Chain Management. He is doing an internship at the Supply Chain Management department and was so kind to guide me through FloraHolland for half a day and told me all about its processes and challenges.
On Monday December 21 I visited Bart at his internship at Flora Holland, Naaldwijk. I met him at 7.30h in the morning, which was quite early for me since I am used to get up around 8.00h, now I needed to get up around 5.30h. Bart did not have any trouble with getting up this early because he starts working every day at 6 o’clock until 2.00h in the afternoon. I met him in the flower hall, where it was already quite busy.
FloraHolland
FloraHolland is the biggest flower auction in the world. They are trading flowers to almost everywhere in the world. FloraHolland has several locations, Naaldwijk, Aalsmeer, Bleiswijk and Rijnsburg. FloraHolland owns the auction and buildings, but different companies are located in these buildings as well. However, the way in which flowers are traded is changing significantly: the recent trend is that FloraHolland is only a provider of the market place and growers and buyers increasingly are making their transactions directly without interference of the auction. This means that FloraHolland is becoming a logistic service provider to a larger extend whereas their activities in auctioning are decreasing.
Bart and I walked through the big hall and first stopped at the clock, where buyers gather to bid on flowers. In this case most of them were Christmas decorations because it was a couple of days before Christmas. After walking for a while we jumped on a bike, otherwise it would take ages to walk around and visit all buildings: FloraHolland Naaldwijk consists of different big buildings with a lot of different halls and floors. Some large companies hired special parts to process their flowers there. It is also possible to hire workplace and offices where these companies can work during the day and when they have to wait for their orders to arrive.
Bart’s projects
In one of the first weeks Bart started working as a regular employee to get more insight in the way of working around the flower hall. In this way he was able to meet the regular staff that are present on a daily basis. During these days he worked as an order picker and he had to find his way through different buildings and halls. This also provided him with the opportunity to get acquainting with the work that is carried out by the working staff on the floor. He moved around on a small buggy and got orders and messages via his headphones. These messages told him which order had to be put in which hall. According to Bart, this helped him in identifying problems that occur on the work floor. Afterwards he had a better view on what could be done to smoothen the process in the distribution halls. Because of this, he has a better understanding of the problems that occur on the floor and is better able to provide suitable solutions. For example, he made a schedule that was presented in the flower hall on which employees could track their results. Also, this schedule allowed the supervisor to keep an eye on safety issues that occur on the working floor.
According to Bart, the fun thing about doing an internship at FloraHolland is that you can discover things which management does not have enough time for and pick up the projects that interest you the most.
For example, Bart told me about a case where a process coordinator was lacking time to control the behaviour of their customers: Customers where violating the regulations on safety by putting their flowers in the middle of the workplace. As we found out when cycling through the flower hall it was quite challenging to evade all containers. He was asked to look into this and in order to do so, Bart followed the process coordinator during a couple of regular working days. During this days, Bart found out that the main problem was that the coordinator spend most of his time on the symptoms, and consequently he was not able to focus on the underlying cause: the behaviour of the customers. With the identification of the cause, the first step towards a solution was made.
Another complaint from customers that Bart frequently encountered, was that according to most customers, the time of processing their purchases and distributing at the loading docks took too long. Bart was asked to look into this, and therefore made an analysis of the process at the different loading docks. He calculated that in theory, the amount of docks would be sufficient to process the required amount of freight per unit of time. With this information, the supply chain department was able to identify that these complaint were not justified, as the average waiting time at the docks did not exceed the agreed-upon time.
At the end of the tour we parked our bikes and Bart showed me the room where all main goals of the company were presented. It was nice to see that Bart’s projects indirectly also contribute to these company goals.
Future
When asking Bart about his future career plans, he stated that working at FloraHolland would definitely be an option. He was very positive about the way he was able to develop himself during the internship, for example by closely working together with different people across the organization. This helped him in developing his people skills, while also being challenged on different areas of expertise. Also, he found that the changes within the economy and industry, with increased competition, provided an exciting challenge for the future, in turning the company into a more extended logistics service provider.
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