Management column: "With Floriday, we make the whole chain more efficient"

Completion of merger

A lot of hard work has gone into building a uniform IT infrastructure within Royal FloraHolland in recent years, based on modern technology standards. We are saying goodbye to all the old IT still in use at the various locations. This effectively completes the 2008 IT merger. In about two years' time, we will have a state-of-the-art infrastructure to which growers and buyers, large and small, can easily connect. We combine a digital platform with a logistics platform. Our digital platform brings together all the cooperative's functionalities: the transaction side (clock and direct), logistics services and financial settlement.

Pooling purchasing power

To take full advantage of all the opportunities and possibilities Floriday offers, growers have been working, often together with their software suppliers, to adapt their own ICT systems and redesign their processes and working methods. Many buyers are still in the middle of this, and step by step they are also starting to buy more and more through Floriday. FloraMondo and KOA will be housed on Floriday in the long run, bundling more and more buying power on one platform. Both clock purchases and direct trade will soon be possible only in Floriday.

New IT infrastructure offers plenty of opportunities

If you look at our own IT infrastructure, we are disconnecting everything from each other to ensure that we can then reconnect it much more easily and flexibly. We are decoupling commercial, logistical and financial processes with the advantage that we will soon be able to offer new services. And for that reason, we will say goodbye to the Electronic Delivery Form for the Clock (Clock-EAB) next year.

This new IT infrastructure enables us to bring new services to the market that facilitate growers' logistics and commercial process even better. We offer growers more opportunities to distribute their supply on the day across different trade channels. We have therefore recently started experiments around Auction Presales at a number of FPCs. In these tests, we investigate the effect if, for example, auction presales trade becomes available earlier in the market. From growers stock up with us and sell from this supply via both direct and clock. And we can use Select Delivery to supply it at a time slot of our choice. We can only achieve this if the underlying systems are decoupled. Floriday enables the orchestration of Royal FloraHolland services to be completely in the hands of the grower and buyers. We seamlessly bring supply and demand together through Floriday. However, there is more. In Floriday, growers will soon be able to enter all information related to sustainability. As well as cultivation information, they will also be able to enter information about packaging.

Sector platform

Floriday has already developed into a sector platform, an infrastructure that allows the entire supply chain to work more efficiently. Both between companies, and within companies. When margins are under pressure, this is the way to stay healthy as a sector. More and more growers and also buyers say that thanks to Floriday they save a lot of time and therefore money. Already 27 per cent of orders are initiated by buyers. By the end of this year, our ambition is for this to grow to 40 per cent. Of all orders, 95 per cent are now settled through Floriday. We work with a roadmap for new services and functionalities. Growers and buyers are constantly adding to that roadmap. Because Floriday is never finished.

André van der Linden, CIO