Complete technical and substantive rebuild of the Insights application at Royal FloraHolland

During renovation, the sale continues

Every day, Royal FloraHolland trades 25 million flowers and plants worldwide with an annual turnover of 4.6 billion. We are helping Royal FloraHolland, the globally active auction house that employs 160,000 people in the Netherlands alone, with digitisation.  While 'the store' remained open, Conclusion rebuilt the Insights application from the ground up.

Insights provides growers with up-to-date price information

Insights is offered by Royal FloraHolland within the Floriday application landscape. Insights offers the grower immediate and clear up-to-date information to set a good price for the direct sale or Clock Presale of flowers and plants. In one screen, the grower can see his clock prices per lot, the average clock price for the product group and the position in the auction group. This provides insight into pricing across locations. The grower can also compile graphs to compare his own products across locations, with different grades or in relation to other products or product groups. Insights is therefore an essential tool for growers.

Built from scratch

We started with an analysis of the current application landscape within Royal FloraHolland. On the basis of existing software, a set-up has been chosen that best suits this. The application was then rebuilt from scratch by two developers. With a combination of React, NodeJS, AWS and GraphQL. The design of the website was made in collaboration with a specialized designer. This designer is also responsible for the design of the larger platform Floriday. This has the great advantage that there is a uniform style and design across all applications.

Including the customer in the process

We largely developed the application in the IT department of the flower auction in Aalsmeer. As a result, the lines of communication between product owner, designer and developers were short. It also allowed us to keep the customer well informed of the progress. For example, we regularly gave demos to internal stakeholders during the early development phases of the application. This resulted in feedback that we could process immediately.

Obstacles and learnings

During the assignment, it turned out that there was a capacity shortage for the back-end of the application. At the same time, the development of the front-end had progressed to such an extent that the AMIS staff started helping with the back-end. In no time they have mastered new technology (AWS, Python). Since then, they have been involved in the application full-stack. From that moment on, he was able to quickly enter the test phase. A select group of growers was allowed to test the product. An additional advantage is that the AMIS employees can also use their full-stack expertise in future projects.

How do you put an auction in an app?

For the application, the complex operation of the auction had to be captured in a domain model. This was achieved through intensive exchange of ideas between the two developers. Each finding was fed back to the product owner. Because Insights is part of the larger Floriday landscape, it is important that some components are offered in their own components. This is characteristic of application development with the React framework. The independent operation of a component enables other applications to easily implement this component in their application. A 'teaser' has been designed for Floriday in which a widget from the Insights application is shown. This gives customers a taste of what Insights has to offer, and they are tempted to visit the website and take out a subscription.

Testing, testing, testing

During development, unit tests were written for all back-end code. In addition, end-to-end testing has been set up for the front-end with the Cypress framework. Currently, several hundred growers have been onboarded who test the product in practice on a daily basis. We will soon be scaling up, so that thousands of flower growers can start using the application.

Technical specifications

Technologies used are React, Redux, GraphQL, Apollo, I18Next, Typescript, JSS, Recharts, Material-UI, Cypress, NodeJS, AWS.