Food Industry R&D software

Food industry R&D strives to improve every step of the product transformation. It all starts with variety and agronomy research to boost up raw material cultivation. Profitability and quality are at heart of their concerns all along the crop transformation process.

The R&D department takes into account bunches of heterogeneous information from all the activities: genetics, agronomy, analytical, industrial processing, tasting panels, consumer experience...

Putting together all those activities is a challenge!

Food industry R&D departments take it up with much collaboration and a central IT system to make the most of data and put workflows in common:

• Modern breeding techniques such as genomic and marker assisted selection
• High throughput phenotyping to improve traits and resistances to environmental constraints
• GxE (Genetic x Environment) analysis to provide a steady quality under environment variations
• The chain of return of experience from the market integrated to plant breeding
• Fine traceability in terms of production, genetic origin and transformation to comply with societal expectations for transparency

Food industry R&D software enables to integrate plant breeding with the other R&D activities.

Researchers sharing the same system get empowered to innovate, face new insights and settle strategies and processes to give efficient responses for better seed performance and quality of the crop transformation process.

Benefits of R&D software for food industries

Based on a Research Resource Planning² and collaborative database systems, R&D software supports innovative long-term processes such as crop pedigree breeding, agronomic research and laboratory analysis.

When the teams share research work efficiently, integrated data management and analysis thanks to an Information System enabling:

• ‍Data warehouse capacities for heterogeneous information management from multi activities
• ‍Process-oriented software for daily R&D work planning and monitoring
• ‍Data analysis tools for advanced reporting and decision making assistance:

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Benefits of R&D software for Food industry genetics:

• ‍Real time data management from the breeding to the sales department increases reactivity and decision-making during field works.
• Encourage collaboration between researchers. Improves data sharing quality, and reduces the redundancy of information to save resources and investments.
• Standardize and industrialize processes to improve the efficiency of the work and save time.
• ‍Valuation of research data lets breeders centralize and compile phenotype, genomic and environmental information and extract the best indicators. (i.e. Secure and Valorize Germplasm)

RnDExp™ Standard software for Food Industry Research

The standard software RnDExp™ is part of RnDExperience™ suite to manage research activities on a central system.

It enables to share data in real time, worldwide, under subtle right settings letting users and teams read, write or edit information.

Research departments of the agro-food industry have much to gain in automating their processes to facilitate staff integration and skill transfer:

• Raw food industries such as Cristal Union looking for the methods to extract the most sugar from sugarbeets.
• End product food industries studying solutions to avoid raw product shortage, for example a giant of chocolate sweets.
• Seed companies like Secobra developing the best Barley varieties in Europe  for beer brewing.
• Technical institutes researching technical knowledge, for instance Terres Inovia for the French Oil sector.

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‍RnDExperience™ standard software and Doriane expert services ensure sustainability of the R&D information system:

A totally new version of the software is issued every 10 years on average, and twice a year in average an upgrade improves the existing features and releases new tools.

That "software life cycle" strategy, along with Research software quality standards guarantees the necessary technology evolutions in strategic domains for research :

• IT (Web interfaces, bigdata, Artificial Intelligence)
• Agronomy (Drones, IOTs, Plant Scoring app)
• R&D (traceability, data inter-operability)

Our consulting services bring the necessary tools and support for customers to migrate in good conditions to sustainable, up-to-date and efficient platforms.

Software editor and consulting partner for Seed and Food industry research departments for more than 30 years, Doriane has developed the plant breeding software RnDExperience™ based on the concept of RRP, Research Resource Planning. In partnership with customers from all over the world, Doriane’s innovations combine:

• The management of all types of flow and experiments on live material
• An integration with an RDBMS (Relational Database Management System)

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This article is based on a scientific publication at Seed To Pasta Conference 2018 from Mezino, Duminil and Royer, Doriane SAS.

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Notes:

¹ Research departments of seed companies rely on RnDExperience® to achieve their breeding objectives, such as Gautier Semences and RAGT (ranked number 1 in Europe on the winter wheat market).

² Royer F.: Enterprise Integrated Data Management, ERP and RRP, in the Seed Business, SeedQuest (2009) : « For research departments, these ecosystems of software are replaced by RRP, or Research Resource Planning, solutions using a shared relational database and able to manage complex business processes. The RnDExp® software suite by Doriane is an example of RRP. »

‍Bread, Chocolate, Coffee, Wine, Beer... Quite a few foods are made of a raw crop that gets processed through several steps into a final product.