Frédéric Royer

How can information technology make seed companies more successful?

Information technology can contribute to making seed companies more successful as it has done for any kind of industrial company. Two different aspects must be considered. First, tools and organizational systems that give general competitive advantage, and second an enterprise culture that can create new market segments where protected products can be marketed.

Over the last 30 years, both aspects have experienced significant advances. For enterprise organization and competitiveness, the coming of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is certainly the most significant development. ERP solutions are implemented by a decision of the board of all companies which would like to be very reactive in their reporting and decision making process. Needless to say, companies that decide to delay the move to ERP may not be in business very much longer. ERP is replacing specific software solutions that have been developed internally in many companies. Replacing specific software with standard software has been a steady trend for the last 40 years in the IT industry.

Some argue that the seed industry is very specific and different from other industries. They question whether ERP can handle the specificities of the seed business, and they argue that there have been examples of difficulties in implementing ERP in the seed industry.

In all the domains addressed by standard software there have been experts and gurus who explained that it was not possible to do it in a standard way. The 40-year of IT disproves this point of view. A few key conditions are necessary for the success of standard software implementation, the first of which is to be able to work at the same time with three or four competitors who want to look for a common future in their IT investments. Trying to develop a standard software without working with several clients at the same time is a mistake. Next, you need to have Information Technology engineers who really master their craft, who have expertise both in IT and in the customer's speciality, and who are ready to work half for their baby (i.e. the software) and half for the customer in the implementation of the software.

Implementing ERP in a company must be a board decision. It is a long term project that can take several years. Its implementation method and costs justify that the "change management" be included, which requires many more time from the key actors in the company. Doing that work requires the attention of the directors and impacts the future shape of their activity. Some companies decide to move to ERP to justify cost-cutting decisions: in those cases, it is likely that the ERP implementation will get neither the attention of the employees nor the funding needed to bring the project to the production stage.

The ideal situation for implementation of ERP software is when the company is in good shape. That's when you can invest in ERP to put in place the structures of the company's future growth.

It would be erroneous to assume that ERP can handle all the facets of the enterprise in one step. That is never the case. Each company has its own culture, the foundation of its competitive advantage, and the implementation must be done in several steps, providing enough time for both the tool and the company to converge. In many cases, the standard software has not previously been adapted to a specificities of the client's industry. In that case, in view of the cost and length of the implementation, and of the fact that several enterprises must participate simultaneously in the implementation, a cautious decision should be made to keep in place a specific, company-internal software or, alternatively, to implement a software dedicated to that activity. Of course, it is essential that the interfaces of the enterprise ERP should be as standardized as possible.

I am often asked why there are so few good ERP packages on the market. Well, this has to do with the fact that Information Technology is an art.

Developing standard software architectures, which mimic as accurately as possible part of the real world, is comparable to painting. The style can be hyperrealist, cubist or impressionist. You will want an information management system that can handle the future development and growth of your company. You are aware that today’s hyperrealist management of your information will look terribly old fashioned in the near future. So, what about impressionism?

If you recognize in your IT provider as true craftsmen and artists, and you like their style, you will be willing to pay for their products and services, and you are likely to enjoy, and benefit from, their creation for years to come.

Developing an ERP solution is not a trivial undertaking, and to process implementating ERP in a company is even more complex: one must meet with all employees whose work will be affected by the new system and find a unified vision of the company’s culture while at the same time doing the "change management" to prepare the future.

The solution is to proceed carefully, step by step, department by department, so that the power of the information management system fully reflects the efforts made by all participants.

For the general enterprise management, the rare true ERP systems, the ones that come near the fundamental concept, the best known are JD Edwards, Oracle Applications, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Vision, but of course there are many others. However, keep in mind that the software is only 40% of the work, 60% is in the implementation - that is if you get the good consultants and project leaders!

Let's look specifically at the seed industry. In Europe, and more precisely in France, where we have a pretty good idea of the market, seed companies are using ERP systems, mainly the one mentioned above, for their general management. In departments whose activities are very specific to the seed business, they rarely try to implement ERP. There, they prefer to keep home-made applications or to buy standard software that is custom made for the specific area of activity. The two keys areas that are still very specific to the seed industry are:
- the management of the seed production, handling seed generations and farmers contracts, and
- the seed sales with management of samples, products replacement, technicians visits and operating through resellers.

What specific IT solutions does your company offer? 

Where does Doriane and its RRP LABKEY fit in the organization? Well, I forgot to mention that ERP systems don't usually enter the research department! ERP systems know the inputs for the R&D, staff, investments, materials, etc. Some of them put a small window on the research employees screen expecting their self declaration of project time sharing. That’s all!

To fill this gap, Doriane created Research Resource Planning (RRP) in strict analogy to ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning. We came up with this concept while working with several of our customers who were on ERP systems and decided to move to our LABKEY solution. At that point, the analogies of the software concepts and in the implementation process became obvious. The fact that ERP doesn’t go to the R&D department did the rest.

RRP LABKEY is an information system that is able to store one time a genotype reference, as it is in the real seed bag in the stock, and one time the output of that genotype for each experiment where it has been sown or planted. This sounds simple, yet it took 20 years of hard work and the expertise of a team of seven PhDs and engineers. Developing these very simple concepts has been a long and incremental work performed with the input of various seed and food companies such as Bayer Bioscience, Caussade-Semences, subsidiaries of Groupe Limagrain, Nestlé, subsidiaries of Syngenta, Plant Breeding International, Pioneer-France, RAGT, Vilmorin, etc.

RRP LABKEY is able to handle really any kind of crop. What is essential in RRP is a high level of customization that makes every breeding team think that it has its very own information management system, completely in tune with the company's own internal culture. LABKEY is working very well for annual farm crops such as corn, wheat, barley, sorghum, soybean , sunflower, canola, rapeseed, but also on forages and sugar beet as well as vegetables such as asparagus, carrot, peper, strawberry, tomato, etc. At this stage, we can say that the concepts and the fundamentals of the system are really robust, so there is no limit to the number of crops it can handle. LABKEY can even handle flower breeding research on alstroemeria, freesia, and the likes.

LABKEY doesn't cover all the activities of the seed R&D. Today, LABKEY handles the heart of the genotype management :

• LABKEY-SERVER for the genotype stock and trial management;

• LABKEY-SELECTION for breeding experiments (starting populations, crossings, nurseries, isolations, hybrids productions, fixing process, genotype conversion, pathology, etc.);

• LABKEY-EXPERIMENTATION for seed testing experiments (across various sites and years);

• LABKEY-DEVELOPMENT for development and marketing (product description, comparison to checks and competitors, result representation on maps, etc.) and

• LABKEY-MOBILE which provides data collection on hand-held computers based on MS-Windows-CE.NET, by CATCHKEY, for direct scoring or data collection connected to apparatus (scale, moisture meter, barcode reader, oil analyzer, …).

Our vision of the complete RRP includes other modules, some more scientific, such as LABKEY-Molecular-Markers and LABKEY-Assisted-Breeding, some more specifically destined for management purposes, such as LABKEY-Planning, LABKEY-Tracing or LABKEY-Finance.

Two modules, LABKEY-Molecular-Markers and LABKEY-Planning are in development. This development is taking place within a European project called MMPLAN, under the leadership of Doriane. It has won  the EUREKA label. The first prototypes will be tested at industrials sites by the fall of 2004. Other modules are scheduled to be tested in 2005 and 2006.

Doriane's RRP-LABKEY is already implemented in France, Germany, Great-Britain, The Netherlands, and North and South America.

For more information about Doriane SA, please visit www.doriane.com
Frédéric Royer can be reached at frederic.royer@doriane.com

May 2004