Keystone of the seed company's innovation center, your breeding department is connected to all the actors of the research department, from the objectives setting up to production. You exchange information and work closely with the other activities, and have much to gain in sharing information fastly and securely. With a groupware such as RnDExperience®, the plant breeding software can get integrated throughout the whole department, it becomes a collaborative IT system.
How the plant breeding software satisfies every user's needs, and enables the whole research department to work together securely and efficiently ?
Breeders and technicians [...] need powerful tools to collect data, validate the information, take decisions and monitor your activity.
One software to run all plant breeding tasks
All along the breeding program, you follow several operations: crosses and hybridization, Inbred line production, test crosses and trials, reporting...
The plant breeding software supports you and your team at every key stage thanks to specific tools. The plasticity of the software enables to configure it according to your corporate standards and also with your own customs. With tools based on your own methods, the plant breeding software enables you to make the most of your expertise in agronomy and breeding.
When you choose parental lines for your next crossings, you like to do it your way: Select a list of males and females with your own criteria, give attention to specific traits and combining abilities to make your selection. And you can do the same in the plant breeding software, quickly, without hazardous data manipulation, on a powerful crossing matrix. Every step of your breeding program gets optimized by a tool configured to your use preferences. You may even discover new useful features included in the system and start using it !
New technologies bring innovative features to the plant breeding software. At Doriane, with our 30 years of agro and IT expertise, we have noticed how breeders and agronomists benefit from interactive graphics and instant reporting for instance:
- Free from individual data, you can focus on key performance indicators and general trends.
- Liberated from repetitive tasks, you get more productive and responsive, an example is how Caussade semences optimizes field monitoring with a synchronized fleet of scoring apps.
All research activities connected to the plant breeding software
The plant breeding software can get integrated throughout the whole department, it becomes a collaborative IT system.
Working at the heart of the research department, you depend on other activities to conduct your breeding studies: laboratory, testing department, research management, IT department, warehouse stocks, product develoment... If every activity has its own software delivering heterogeneous information, you can always import it manually or inquire the service of IT experts to build an ETL² system that converts automatically the data to your plant breeding software.
But there is much to gain in using the same software throughout the whole research department. Firstly, interoperability enables to share research work with the other actors (laboratory automation for instance). Besides, homogeneous information from the various activities can be queried and combined easily in real time. With RnDExperience®, every activity gets its own configuration, with specific data and tools, thanks to a strict separation between the software core and its configuration, and the ability to deploy various configurations.
An integrated collaborative system enables every researcher to track, automate and share samples, provided that he has the access rights on the activity, process and data. The IT department benefits from this configuration that reduces the system heterogeneity and from the scalability ensuring the durability of the project. And research managers highly appreciate the real time dashboards and standardized reports facilitating piloting and decision-making. Last but not least, centralized IT systems tend to be less expensive in the long run³.
“Information is not knowledge”
Albert Einstein.
From software to research department IT system
Research information is one of the most important assets for your organization, and you want a safe place to store it. IT experts are in charge of IT security, and make sure no data gets lost or stolen, but the quality of the information stored depends on how you configure homogeneous standards and automate your work processes. The plant breeding software helps you ensure the qualification of your germplasm, secure and valorize your R&D information.
Integrating most of your breeding and testing processes in a central system structures information and knowledge, for instance by using a common material and ontology codification, or by describing process methods. Such cross-functional R&D information system benefits to know-how transfer, notably accelerating new co-worker integration and limiting the loss when a researcher leaves. Moreover, the system tracks your operations so that you can follow your team's work progress, and many tasks can get automated in order to save time and avoid errors.
Most tools of RnDExperience® plant breeding groupware have been used by thousands of breeders worldwide. Doriane's editor team improves it year after year to benefit from the latests IT innovations and integrate users' evolution requests. User experience is particularly at the center of Doriane preoccupations: we strive to propose friendly interfaces and intuitive tools that facilitate the adoption of a new the plant breeding software by your team, which is essential for the success of the implementation project.
"One of the major success factors in R&D teams is that the knowledge acquired by the individuals in the team surpasses individual intelligence"
Civelek, M. E.
Choosing an IT partner for your breeding department is not an easy task and deserves much attention. You will be using it every day and the decision will impact your research department for many years. The most important is that you have all the tools to conduct your studies efficiently. In a nutshell, your future plant breeding software must fulfill three main goals:
- Organize the work along all research activities, and save time at the key steps of the season.
- Provide all the tools needed along the breeding process for researchers and technicians to plan, conduct and analyze its studies with decision-making support.
- Connect all the actors of the research department to facilitate safe sharing of data and proceedings from the set-up of research objectives to production.
Breeder or agro-technician, you are using a plant breeding software for your daily activities in breeding, testing, analytical. You run digital tools to collect data, validate the information, take decisions and monitor your activity. The plant breeding software is not only your daily work instrument, it provides also the dashboards to organize and monitor the breeding programs.
Doriane provides plant breeding software to small teams of breeders or testers, as well as big research departments with more than 200 researchers. We propose a whole range of ready-to-use configurations to start quickly, and we also offer highly configurable tools to address every R&D needs.In our experience and most of our customers' opinion, a departemental software must be able to adapt to the specificities of all research processes, and at the same time rely on a standard core offering security, sustainability and economical maintenance cost over the years.
Our team with double expertise in IT and agronomy is ready to discuss your needs (sales) and support you all along the project (consulting).
Leave us a message for more information !
Sources and notes:
¹- Read the complete study on ERP benefits (part 1) and its implications on the Indian seed market (part 2): How RRP systems bring resource advantages to Indian seed companies
²- ETL or Extract Transform Load is a general procedure of copying data from one or more sources into a destination system which represents the data differently from the source(s) or in a different context than the source(s)(Wikipedia).
³- Most studies on ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) show that integrating with one unified tool different activities bring more return on investment (ROI) than an Information System fragmented with various bridges to maintain. Our company Doriane has installed plant breeding software for vegetal research departments for more than 30 years, and we strongly believe in the benefits of integrated and cross-functional R&D information system that enable to extend the use of the breeding software to further activities.
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