The Company - an international leader in the breeding of vegetables
Rijk Zwaan specializes in breeding vegetables and supplying vegetable seeds for commercial cultivation in glasshouses, polythene tunnels and outdoors. Rijk Zwaan is based in the Netherlands but has at its disposal numerous locations worldwide for the breeding of varieties, the production and sales of seed and providing services to its customers. The company employs over 1.200 employees. This places the company amongst the top 10 largest vegetable breeding companies in the world.

The Challenges - find a centralized solution
Rijk Zwaan's IT department needed a centralized project management solution to plan projects, manage all the project requests, and the time spent on all tasks. Before they had disparate solutions to manage their projects, but no real project management solution. “Managing all these disparate solutions was very difficult and the lack of visibility was compromising the success of different projects”, says Mr. Ferry Voortman IT System Manager. “We could not see the relationship between delays or problems in some of the steps and how they impacted the overall project and other projects.”

The Solution
Rijk Zwaan has been using Lotus Notes for many years; they wanted a solution based on the platform to minimize their investments. They also wanted a tool with an English user interface. They also appreciate that Genius Inside is a company fully dedicated to project management software and have good experience in the market.

The Results - improved planning, resource mangement and reporting
Rijk Zwaan deployed the solution during from October till December 2007 and on the 1st January 2008, they began to fully use the solution and integrate all projects into Genius Project4Domino. They use primarily Genius Project4Domino for time reporting, resource management, project planning and project requests. “Now we have one unique tool that integrates time and project reporting, project planning and resource management. We have improved project visibility and collaboration as all project leaders have access to the project information”

Rijk Zwaan's IT department has created one project database to manage all their projects and use Genius Planner to plan their projects. “Genius Planner is an easy-to-use planning tool to create tasks and assign resources and we finally can share easily project plans and progress with all project team members”.

Rijk Zwaan uses extensively the timesheet module for time reporting. The collaborators report 100% of their time in timesheets. They have developed two different timesheet templates; one for all activities for projects and one for all activities not in the project such as support and holidays. “With Genius' user-friendly timesheets, it's easy to report time as we can create many timesheets for one week.” “It's easier and faster to create reports thanks to Genius's intuitive reporting engine within the portfolio”.

Centralized resource pool has enabled Rijk Zwaan to plan their projects more realistically as they have defined as unavailability the time spent on non-project activities. “It's a great advantage to be able to have a global view of all resource availability, we can see which resource is overbooked and change our planning's accordingly”.

Rijk Zwaan also took advantage of Genius Project4Domino customizable possibilities to have a personal project template to simplify project creation and also to define their own workflow for project request. “These customization save us a lot of time and ensure consistency in our project processes”.

The Future
Rijk Zwaan is a large company and other departments would like to use a project management solution. The IT department is going to test it for a while and if the test is successful, there are good chances that they will deploy the solution to other departments.