The product development depends on agronomical trials

Research teams create many new hybrids/varieties each year (in France, between 900 and 1000 candidate cultivars per year), depending on strategic factors based mainly on agronomic quantitative and qualitative traits which they aim to improve.

The product development activity takes into account economic, environmental, industrial and administrative constraints to address the end customers, farmers with varieties/hybrids registered by the research activity.

It proposes recommendations to sale activity on the basis of an agronomic synthesis done through a trial network monitored with distributors and farmer’s partnership who accept to retrieve observations. So the development activity can be in charge with sale activity to write the product book for website publication or brochures.

As a pre-sale activity, the trials followed by the Development department can generally:

• Include a competitor comparison on different factors;
• Are spread over wide geographic expansion;
• Are less structured than yield and research trials with more heterogeneous results.

The different functions of the RnDExp software

Objectives of development trials are different from research trials. Because development trials are done on certified varieties/hybrids (which are stable and considered as distinct from other material in the market) advanced statistical algorithms to validate and analyze the trials are not used. Development in charge prefer to use more data visualization tools with graphics and simple calculation for quick comparisons.  

Doriane has strived to offer to the development activity on the border between sales and Research some efficient tools making benefit of using a unified system all along the process of variety creation up to the downstream processes of selling varieties and hybrids:

• Follow many different experiments and get the most of them all: Multi-local and multi-factorial testing, geographical management of testing platforms, and integration of heterogeneous data such as field trials and laboratory analysis.
• Advanced querying tools: display row data or aggregated field evaluations results, querying on cultivars, years, locations, trials, soil properties…
• Geographic data visualization: display pie charts, color scales, histograms, distribution maps on geographic zones on a high resolution world map.
• Manages descriptions of products from research with a view to preparing the sales launch
• Can be used to compare products with those of the competition

PRODUCT COMPARISON

• Evaluation of the performances of a product (variety, phytosanitary product, growing method, etc…), possibility to compare two varieties or products with display of the number of winners and the percentage
• The results of the experiments are stored in the database, and are used to build the Comparison Table
• The Comparison Table is a synthesis of the experiments on which will be done comparisons. It's built choosing varieties to compare, the variables of comparison, the experimental conditions and the characteristics of experiments.

PRINTING OUT THE REPORT

• Depending on the comparison type and the product characteristics you wish to highlight
• Synthesis of experimental information will be defined in a comparison profile as an Excel or fine report

MAPPING THE RESULTS

• To display experiment locations on a map, and display the data in graphic form.
• Display of Experiment locations and access to the data of each experiment by double-clicking on the location on the map. Compatibility with mapping database standards (MAPInfo).
• Graphical representation of comparison results.

RndExp enables the Development and Marketing department to assess products for marketing and manages the history of product experimentation descriptions for the pre- and post-sales launch phases:

• Management of simple experiments without replications.
• Structured queries multi trials.
• Tool for varieties comparison with competitor ones.
• Results display on geographical maps that can be directly exploited by the marketing department.