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Improved market insights through Front-end development Royal FloraHolland

The dynamics and hectic pace of dozens of 'trains' with carts full of flowers, crisscrossing each other in immense auction halls. Traders who are focused on the clock and are looking for the best deal. The enormous amount and variety of flowers, coming from about 50 countries that change hands every day. The flower auction in Aalsmeer is not only a world in itself, but also the largest flower auction in the world. Every day, Royal Flora Holland trades 25 million flowers and plants with an annual turnover of 4.6 billion. Here, too, the entire process of trade and logistics is digitizing at a rapid pace. And the business is becoming more and more data-driven.

Client

Royal Flora Holland

Market

Retail, Food & Agri

Theme

Fit for purpose software

Date published

12 november 2019

Applicatie voor veilingen bij Royal Flora Holland gaat live dankzij AMIS Conclusion

Built from the ground up

At Royal FloraHolland, AMIS is working on the Insights application. An information service that offers flower growers insight into the current pricing of their products. The grower can see in real time what prices have been achieved on the clock and how the pricing is going. It is an operational support system for the grower to decide what he can sell, how much, for what price and to whom. Since the existing application was very outdated, the entire application was rebuilt from the ground up.

How Royal FloraHolland ended up with AMIS is easy to explain. And it also immediately shows the power of Conclusion's ecosystem. André van Dalen, Director of AMIS Domain Director of Data Driven Business, explains: "AMIS is part of Conclusion, which allows us to do business with different parts of our ecosystem in a broader context. And since Conclusion, as Royal FloraHolland's preferred supplier, was already familiar with their business, AMIS was the logical choice for this front-end project."

The application was largely developed 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 from the early development phases with demos, among other things. The feedback could be processed immediately. "The special thing about AMIS is that we always want to link the know-how to the know-why: what is a customer doing it for? We want to be able to understand very well what is actually needed. As a result, we can better meet the challenges that you encounter in all kinds of processes," says André van Dalen.

AMIS also used for the back-end

During the assignment, it turned out that there were too few people for the back-end of the application. At the same time, the front-end had already progressed to such an extent that the AMIS staff started helping with the back-end. In no time they have mastered new technology. Since then, they have been involved in the application full-stack. An additional advantage of this is that the AMIS employees can also use their full-stack expertise in future projects. André van Dalen: "That is interesting and fun for several reasons: on the one hand, we are working on changing the business as it is done at the flower auction. On the other hand, we build new applications with the most modern techniques and experiment with the latest technology to get the most out of IT."

"At AMIS, we always want to link the know-how to the know-why. What does a customer do it for."
André van Dalen

A complete auction in one app

For the application, the complex operation of the auction had to be captured in a domain model. To this end, ideas were intensively exchanged between the developers. Each finding was fed back to product owner Martien Rölling at Royal FloraHolland. Martien works with two teams: a BI team and the Insights team. The BI team does data maintenance, collects all data and makes it available. The Insights team develops new data products. Martien Rölling: "We came into contact with AMIS through Conclusion. We are therefore here with a mixed team: the AMIS crew is working on the front-end development, the front end of the application, but can also take on other tasks from our own IT staff within the scrum team, such as the back-end. I find that very nice and efficient to work with. “

"I value how the AMIS team contributes beyond front-end, taking on back-end work within the scrum team."
Martien Rölling - Product Owner BI of Royal Floraholland

“De meerwaarde van Insights voor Royal FloraHolland is, dat als wij onze kwekers op een betere positie brengen wat ook gunstig is voor Royal FloraHolland. Met deze dienstverlening bieden we de kweker betere marktinzichten waardoor hij een beter bedrijfsresultaat kan boeken. Zo binden we de kweker nog meer aan ons en wordt een tevredener klant,” licht Martien toe.

Product owner team BI talks about building an auction app for auctioning flowers

Eén scherm voor actueel inzicht

Insights wordt door Royal FloraHolland aangeboden binnen het applicatielandschap Floriday. Insights biedt de kweker direct en overzichtelijk actuele informatie om een goede prijs te stellen voor de directe verkoop of Klokvoorverkoop. In één scherm heeft de kweker inzicht in de prijsvorming over locaties heen. Tevens kan hij zelf grafieken samenstellen om eigen producten te vergelijken met verschillende sorteringen, of ten opzichte van andere producten of productgroepen.

"At AMIS, you work as a consultant, manage your own time, and get to take ownership of projects."
André van Dalen

Nathan Breuring, Software Development Consultant AMIS: “Ik werk voornamelijk als front-end developer aan de applicatie Insights. Het leuke van het project is dat je echt op locatie werkt. Je wordt ondergedompeld in de organisatie en je werkt aan een product dat ook echt meerwaarde gaat leveren. Je ziet het vanaf het begin ontstaan. We werken met de nieuwste technieken in een hele dynamische omgeving. We hebben het gros van de EPI’s geschreven en in productie gebracht. We werken voornamelijk met React in de front-end, dat is een Java-script gebaseerd framework. Daarnaast gebruiken we GraphQL in de API’s, Python en AWS, dus het werk is heel gevarieerd.”

Auctioning flowers is a delicate matter, building an app for that even more so

Testing, testing…

Tijdens de ontwikkeling werden voor alle front- en back-end code unit-testen geschreven. Daarnaast is voor de front-end een end-to-end testing opgezet met het Cypress framework. Momenteel zijn er enkele honderden kwekers ge-onboard die het product dagelijks in de praktijk uittesten. Ook is voor Floriday is een ‘teaser’ ontworpen waarin een widget uit de Insights applicatie wordt getoond. Zo krijgen klanten een voorproefje van wat Insights allemaal te bieden heeft, en worden zij verleid om de website te bezoeken en een abonnement af te sluiten.

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