Growers closely involved in Floriday's strategy

A strategic meeting was organized on 7 June for a number of interested flower growers from different product groups. Royal FloraHolland Chief Digital Officer, Gerhard van der Bijl, and Floriday Product Owner, Raymond van Sassen, guided the flower growers through all the aspects that are required for developing a platform.

The flower growers in attendance endorsed the Royal FloraHolland and FloraXchange initiative to develop a platform that provides a new digital infrastructure for the entire floriculture sector.

The current market initiatives are based on the current technology with Virtual Market Place (VMP) links. In view of the voluminous data flows and transaction flows, we know that this current infrastructure is not future-proof. This needs to be done using new techniques with API links.

From VMP to API

VMP stands for Virtual Market Place link. This is a standard XML message as outlined in Floricode. The existing software in the floriculture sector supports the current VMP standard messages, but is not future-proof. An API link, on the other hand, makes it possible to offer other systems and software access

to the system (in this case Floriday), enabling different systems to communicate with each other and exchange data. API stands for Application Programming Interface.

"The current message flow, also in terms of information density, has reached its limit. We have seen that new applications require more data exchange. Floriday starts in the garden, with the grower, and provides opportunities to enrich the data on top of the standards we already have. This takes time, as a new 'highway' is under construction.

We will, of course, continue to support the existing VMP links that facilitate easy connections between the current growers' and buyers' systems, but at the same time we are building a new infrastructure." - Gerhard van der Bijl

Development together with flower and plant growers 

One of Floriday's main principles is the development of this digital platform together with the growers. This makes sure the platform really will meet their needs eventually. Various groups periodically provide input to the development of Floriday's roadmap. On an international level, we work together with African growers and their agents. For the plant sector, we have joined forces with Plantform, for which a number of sessions were held in March and April this year. A session was also held with several flower growers on 7 June. Follow-ups to these sessions will take place in the coming months. This co-creation method allows us to work together towards creating the international floriculture platform.