Wetland Plants, Inc. is a native wetland plant nursery designed to create natural stormwater management solutions for large construction projects from Long Island to Baton Rouge. They grow 70 specialized species of plants, focusing on those that are recommended for stormwater management states they serve. They have also worked with state legislatures to recommend diversifying the recommended species in state stormwater management guidelines.
NCGrowth/SmartUp was initially engaged to help organize Wetland’s financial system, such that it will provide accurate indicators for company performance.
Last summer, Nabeel Mehdi, NCGrowth/SmartUp Analyst built a robotic process prototype that can improve business productivity by about 20%. The robotic seeder is a complex and precision engineering device employing peristaltic pumps, stepper motors, drivers, microcontrollers and linear actuators. It will be deployed on site in the coming months.
Analysts also designed and built an IoT system with cloud-based storage and auto-email alerting that will streamline the environment monitoring operations in multiple greenhouses.
Three projects and a robot seeder later, NCGrowth/SmartUp has begun the second phase of the company’s financial analysis. They are currently analyzing financial performance and developing their key findings. The financial analysis will focus on profitability analysis, cost analysis, and a balance sheet analysis. The team will also offer some recommendations for future operations based on the analysis.
The NCGrowth/SmartUp analysts who have contributed to projects with Wetland plants are Claire Castleman, MBA candidate at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, Nabeel Mehdi and Aditi Khamkar, engineering students at North Carolina State University, and Keisuke Nagaura, MBA candidate at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.