Rijk Zwaan
is a vegetable breeding company and seed producer based in The Netherlands with
subsidiaries located over the entire world. The firm maintains its position as one
of the top international companies in this field through constant research, innovation
and investment and a unique company culture.
I've been involved with the company for most of the last decade, firstly as an employee
and later hired in to work on a number of interesting projects. One of these projects
involved adding major new analysis functionality to an in-house application based
on a SQL Server database.
In the past, large datasets containing test results were analyzed by hand to identify
the most efficient and cheapest ways to repeat the tests while guaranteeing test
consistency. This was a long-drawn out process, taking sometimes days at a time,
and had to be carried out by specialists with deep experience & knowledge of the
test materials and be repeated regularly. As such, the process was ripe for automation.
The Rijk Zwaan Research & Development Centre, Fijnaart, Noord-Brabant (foto: Rijk Zwaan)
I spent several days with the experts at the Rijk Zwaan Research & Development Centre
in Fijnaart where we boiled the analysis process down to a consistent series of
actions that needed to be applied in all cases. After that, I translated these steps
into the SQL Server and VBA objects needed to repeat the procedure. I then
updated the MS Access-based desktop application to reflect and make use of the new
functionality. The revised application was tested by RZ staff, and after some fixes
and improvements was accepted for production use early in 2010. The analysis process
now takes just a couple of minutes at most to complete for even the largest datasets
and is fully automated. Additional functionality added since then has expanded the
range of possibilities for these calculations and their ease of use in the application
UI.