Info Support Helps PlantLab with Automation: How Plants Grow Better with Software

PlantLab grows plants year-round under the light of LED lamps in large climate chambers. This requires considerable registration. Where is which crop grown? When was it sown? When should it be harvested? When should the plants be watered and when is a new batch sown? “The way we kept track of our data needed replacing,” says Maarten Buth, Software Product Owner at PlantLab. “In doing so, we have numerous rules, because each plant has its own unique ‘recipe.’ The bigger the company gets, the greater the chance of errors. Especially when you work with extensive data and the number of workers grows substantially. The operators were manually entering all kinds of data. We wanted to make that amount of data more manageable.”

PlantLab called in Info Support to do that. “We wanted to introduce structure, so that operators have an overview of what needs to be done at what time of day. Everyone who works here now immediately sees in the application what they have to do and in what order. One team packs the crop, while another team is already sowing the next batch. This way, everyone works efficiently on the right things and the number of errors has been reduced significantly,” Buth says.

All the right things need to be properly integrated into a system, though. And that is customization for each company, knows Wies Ruiter, IT consultant at Info Support. “We mapped and implemented the entire process flow in detail. It’s a bulk of data that now has a user-friendly interface for operators. A usable tool is essential to the success of this project. Without a tool no reliable data and without reliable data no KPIs to drive on.”

To manage and maintain the app, which sits in the cloud, managed cloud platform services (MCPS) are used. “As a company, you have the choice to set up and manage the infrastructure yourself, both locally and in the cloud. For a fast-growing international company like PlantLab, with international ambitions, we chose a cloud environment, so you don’t have to buy your own servers for each location that can go down. Because of this, there are many advantages to the MCPS. The cloud environment is already set up and managed for us.”

From Info Support, the MCPS is offered as iPaaS: integrated Platform as a Service. Ruiter: “That has the advantage that you can monitor on a large scale, updates are run and security is guaranteed. Those kinds of things are guaranteed in this system.”

Buth: “We have a lot of plant knowledge, but we also build production sites that are fully automated. For that, we need a trained IT team to meet the demand. You can look for staff to do it for you, but people who can do it well are scarce. Ideally you would do it all by yourself, but that’s not possible, so we look elsewhere. We are a scale-up. Things change every day, so we are looking for a flexible partner who acts quickly. We found that in Info Support.”

Software, of course, is no guarantee of a flawless production process. “It is, however, a tool to increase returns, increase volumes and bring down labor costs and ultimately increase yields. Our application also gives us insight into the production process. We expect a certain yield and if it is not there, we can now better retrace where it went wrong. Or imagine that a batch has to be recalled, which used to be a difficult search. With the application, we can much more easily find where that batch went.”

Much of the data collected by PlantLab must now be entered as yet. That doesn’t change. Ruiter: “You have to make sure that the interface is user-friendly for everyone, so that logging takes as little effort as possible. Then logging into the system most easily becomes a way of working for all employees.” And that works well, Buth confirms: “Putting data into a system is not that difficult in practice. Doing that in a structured and standardized way to extract useful things from it is already more difficult.”

As an example, he cites the hardware the company works with. “All that hardware, like lamps and the rooms, are a little bit different. So in each climate chamber, one product grows just a little bit better than another. With data, for example, we try to visualize what the yield of a particular product is in a particular climate chamber. We find out which product grows the fastest and which sells the best. The tool we built in consultation with each other provides the data, which we visualize in another tool.”

The large amount of data at PlantLab has now been streamlined thanks to the application developed by Info Support, which runs in a cloud environment. Anyone working with it can use it. “Our error margins have gone down and efficiency has increased. We have become even better at planning and know exactly how much work we can do. That benefits everyone,” Buth says. “And if we need to expand because we open a new farm somewhere, we easily expand the IT infrastructure.”

Plantlab is a vertical, indoor farm and focuses on growing vegetables in large climate chambers. This has several major advantages, according to the company:

• By growing in an enclosed environment, PlantLab uses 95 percent less water than regular farming. Thanks to the circular system, water is collected, filtered and reused.
• No pesticides are needed as is the case in regular agriculture.
• The short logistics chain also benefits the quality of the plants, so lettuce and herbs have a longer shelf life.
• Those who grow outdoors or in greenhouses depend on the climate. For example, on the sun, which does not shine every hour of the day. In a climate chamber, the plants not only grow faster, but also throughout the year.