The bustle of dozens of ‘trains’ of carts laden with flowers, weaving through vast auction halls. Traders staring intently at the auction clock, hunting for the best deal. The sheer volume and variety of flowers from around 50 countries changing hands every day. The flower auction in Aalsmeer is a world of its own and the largest flower auction in the world. Royal FloraHolland trades 25 million flowers and plants daily, with an annual turnover of €4.6 billion. Here too, the entire trading and logistics process is rapidly becoming digital, and the business is increasingly driven by data.

At Royal FloraHolland, AMIS is working on the Insights application. This information service gives flower growers visibility and insight – insights – into the current pricing of their products. Growers can see in real time which prices have been achieved at the auction clock and how prices are developing. It is an operational support system that helps growers decide what to sell, how much, at what price and to whom. As the existing application was outdated, the entire application was rebuilt from the ground up.

How Royal FloraHolland came to work with AMIS is easy to explain. It also demonstrates the strength of the Conclusion ecosystem. André van Dalen, Managing Director of AMIS and Domain Director of Data Driven Business, explains: “AMIS is part of Conclusion, which allows us to collaborate with different companies within our ecosystem to serve customers more broadly. Since Conclusion was already familiar with Royal FloraHolland’s business as a preferred supplier, AMIS was the logical choice for this front-end project.”

The application was largely developed within the IT department at the flower auction in Aalsmeer. This enabled close communication between the product owner, designer and developers. It also allowed us to keep the customer informed of progress through demonstrations from the early stages of development. Feedback could be incorporated immediately. “What makes AMIS distinctive is that we always aim to connect know-how with know-why: what is the customer trying to achieve? We want to understand exactly what is needed. This helps us tackle the challenges that arise throughout our projects,” says André van Dalen.

During the project, it became clear that there were too few people working on the application’s back-end. By then, front-end development had progressed far enough for the AMIS team to help with the back-end. They quickly mastered the new technology and have been involved in full-stack development of the application ever since. An added benefit is that they can also apply their full-stack expertise to future projects.

André van Dalen: “This makes the work interesting and enjoyable for several reasons. On the one hand, we are helping to transform the way the flower auction does business. On the other, we are building new applications using the most advanced tools and experimenting with the latest technology to get the most out of IT.”

The application required the auction’s complex processes to be captured in a domain model. This involved extensive exchanges of ideas between the developers. Every finding was discussed with Martien Rölling, Product Owner at Royal FloraHolland. Martien works with two teams: the BI team and the Insights team. The BI team maintains, collects and makes all the data available. The Insights team develops new data products.

Martien Rölling: “We were introduced to AMIS through Conclusion. We work here as a combined team: the AMIS crew focuses on front-end development, the user-facing side of the application, but can also take on other tasks within the scrum team that our own IT staff handle, such as back-end development. I find this a very effective and efficient way of working.”

Royal FloraHolland offers Insights as part of the Floriday application landscape. Insights gives growers a clear, immediate overview of current information to help them set the right price for direct sales or auction presales. In a single screen, growers can see how prices are developing across locations. They can also create their own charts to compare their products across different grades, or with other products or product groups.

Nathan Breuring, Software Development Consultant at AMIS: “I mainly work as a front-end developer on the Insights application. What I enjoy about this project is working on site. You become immersed in the organisation and work on a product that will deliver real value. You see it take shape from the very beginning. We work with the latest technologies in a very dynamic environment. We have written and deployed most of the APIs to production. We mainly use React for the front-end, which is based on JavaScript. We also use GraphQL in the APIs, Python and AWS, so the work is very varied.”

During development, unit tests were written for all front-end and back-end code. End-to-end testing was also set up for the front-end using the Cypress framework. Several hundred growers have now been onboarded and are testing the product in their daily work. A ‘teaser’ was also designed for Floriday, featuring a widget from the Insights application. This gives customers a preview of what Insights has to offer and encourages them to visit the website and take out a subscription.