Rijk Zwaan is amongst the top 5 vegetable breeding companies in the world and focuses fully on vegetable seeds offering a wide assortment within the sector. Continuous innovation is essential and Rijk Zwaan invests approximately 30 % of its turnover on R&D.
In the R&D programs, the “applied laboratories” work in close collaboration with the breeding teams from all over the world to verify disease resistance, purity and other vital aspects, thus ensuring the quality of Rijk Zwaan’s products.
In the phytopathology laboratory, disease resistance is tested. Such tests require executing complicated protocols, involving multiple steps and resources.
Outperform Planning is used to create the schedule for all lab requests from breeding teams. This means matching the protocol requirements with the capabilities of resources such as greenhouses, climate cells, tunnels and open field which are located at or managed from in Rijk Zwaan laboratory organisations in different countries. Tests need to be lined up with the availability of pathogens. Some tests can be combined (stacked) others cannot based on very specific rules.
In June 2016, Outperform and Rijk Zwaan started the journey with a proof of concept which tackled a few essential aspects of the laboratory business process. As of September 2016, the project went full steam ahead delivering the system in a series of 3-week scrum sprints, going live in March 2017.
Through tight collaboration between the Rijk Zwaan and Outperform teams and a clear focus on business value, the system was delivered on time, in budget and integrated with the laboratory information system as well as several other legacy systems.
Rijk Zwaan specializes in breeding and supplying vegetable seed for commercial cultivation in glasshouses, tunnels and outdoors, anywhere in the world. In the world’s top 10 of globally-operating vegetable breeding companies, Rijk Zwaan holds a mid-position. Rijk Zwaan has a very broad base, with 900 varieties in approximately 25 different vegetable crops. Breeding and production facilities are located all over the world and seeds are sold in more than 100 different countries. Rijk Zwaan works with locally operating sales subsidiaries and with exclusive distributors. The head office is situated in De Lier, the Netherlands.
This is high on the innovation ladder, the lab organization had never done a project of this breadth and depth before and still the project landed on time and on budget, congratulations to the team!
Tonny Otjens, Information Manager Research & Development | IMS