Interview Questions

What are the challenges you are facing?

What do you currently track?

Do you know your costs to deliver your products to market?

Where do you feel you can decrease your transaction costs?¶

Questions for Similar Distributors (i.e. Growers Collaborative, Red Tomato)¶

How many producers do you work with?

Who moves the product to your aggregation point, you or the producer?

Where did you gain the most efficiencies?

Where was your biggest innovation for logistics?

Do you offer producers fixed rates?

Do you split the fees with producers and buyers?

Viki¶

Question Set as of 8/16:

Transaction Cost Analysis Data Set
Questions and Answers
A transaction cost analysis covers activities associated with post-production handling, packaging, storage, transportation, order placement and invoicing, and customer relationship management. In this analysis, some of the costs are unique to collective, such as collection and on-line store management.
Scope of Analysis:
What are the transactions of Growing Washington – the cooperative – as opposed to the transactions of the individual farms? On the web site, I see both the on-line store and a multi-farm CSA. There is also the King County Local Choice box and other programs.
If the cooperative’s transactions includes more than the on-line store transactions, then do we want to include these in our analysis as well? If the cooperative’s transactions are limited to the on-line store, does this limit the usefulness of our analysis? This goes to what is the question we are really asking in this research. Is our research vision in line with what Growing Washington expects out of this project?
In addition to $ costs, would it make sense to account for time costs and carbon costs?
How do we sort out transition (building a new system) from transaction costs?
What are we comparing to? Selling at farmers market? Using distributor? Do we also want to compare cost of current arrangement to cost of non-collective delivery and optimized routing (that is, 3 cases)?
Order Placement and On-line Store Management?
Are orders only taken through the on-line service? If not, how else is it done and what are associated costs?
How often are products and prices into the system and how long does it take? What other costs are there in system maintenance?
What were the costs of developing the order placement web site? This would be of interest to others if not Growing Washington.
How are quantities decided?
Are there agreements or coordination between the individual farms on what items from which farms are sold through the on-line store?
Is one of the choices we should be looking at is setting a minimum for purchasing? What of the idea of giving discounts for bulk buying? (Perhaps that is the pricing structure now?)
Collection
What are arrangements for getting products from farms to collection points (Alm Hill Farm in Bellingham and 21 Acres in King County)? Are the on-line store products gathered together with the multi-farm CSA products?
Who picks up the costs of getting it from individual farms to collection points – the collective or the individual farms??
Post-production handling, packaging, storage
Who’s involved in putting the orders together?
Who’s responsible for purchasing packaging?
What is the different size packaging/boxes used for delivery? What are costs of different packaging? Are boxes recovered and reused? How?
How often are deliveries made? (On-line store implies Thursdays only)
Can these operations be scaled up by adding more workers? How much more volume justifies another worker (ie, is there an indivisibility challenge in adding people)?
Transportation to Transfer Point
Who’s involved in transportation?
What transport vehicles are available?
Are the number of transfer points the same for all deliveries?
How many transport points are there currently and what is cost (dollars/time) to maintain?
On what basis are drivers paid?
For what portion of delivery trips are on-line deliveries made with deliveries to farmers markets or other-type deliveries? If shared, how many additional on-line deliveries to fill truck?
Transportation to Customer
Who’s involved in transportation?
How are delivery routes decided?
Invoicing
How are individual farms reimbursed from collective? Is this automated through the ordering system?

Customer Relationship Management
What portion of the cooperative management activities are related to doing buy-sell transactions, either through the farmers markets, the CSAs or the on-line store? Where’s the line between the on-line store and the restaurant coalition? If the goal of the coalition is to get people to use the on-line store, then perhaps the time spent organizing should be included in the analysis.
Do costs go up or down with additional producers added into system and with what do they vary? What is break-even volume for producer to join collective?
______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ___

Here is my effort to convert Viki’s questions into measurable indicators. When not possible, I simply stated the question.

Transaction Cost Analysis Data Set
Questions and Answers

Order placement and invoicing

Post-production handling
Describe Packaging Process

Storage Costs: Shed size, labor time for storage.

Transportation modality: delivery costs/to collection points

customer relationship management

Collective costs

Individual costs

produce collection / delivery

on-line store management

Proportion of sales: institutions, retailers, and farmers markets

Labor (time) costs

carbon costs can be deduced later

transition costs are transaction costs: we need to document what they are doing now and compare it to what they do later, once they have our recommendations. In our analysis, we will warn the reader that this is a new business which is creating new systems.

We are comparing GW costs to the industry (distributor) averages. We need this info from the literature. We will not compare their costs to non-collective delivery. After they implement recommendations we should run another comparison.

Why should we look at the costs of online-order placement, unless there are other order-placement modalities? Our study is not geared towards the order placement steps but to the order-fulfillment steps. On-line Store Management costs should be included.

Describe the coordination between the individual farms on

what items from which farms are sold through the on-line store.
arrangements for getting products from farms to collection points

Who picks up the costs of getting it from individual farms to collection points – the collective or the individual farms
Costs of putting the orders together
Costs of packaging, including material procurement.
Are boxes recovered and reused? How?
Frequency of deliveries.
Transportation to Transfer Point
labor and non-labor costs of transport?
Vehicles, fuel, maintenance.

Produce transfer points
Delivery sharing.

How are delivery routes decided?
Invoicing
individual farms reimbursement costs.

Farmer market transactions should not count, unless GW sells the collective produce.

We need Indicator of management time dedicated to transport/delivery activities.