El coste oculto de la rotación del personal de mejora vegetal: ¿le afectará a usted?

Hay muchos costes ocultos cuando se dirige una empresa, pero a veces se olvidan los costes de la rotación de personal. Cuando alguien se va se lleva consigo unos conocimientos y una experiencia que no son fáciles de captar, ni siempre, por un ordenador.

Salidas inesperadas

Si alguno de sus obtentores abandonara inesperadamente su organización, ¿cómo le afectaría? ¿Será una transición suave para el nuevo criador? ¿Podría el cambio ser un golpe devastador para su cartera de nuevos productos? ¿Pondría en riesgo años de progreso en I+D porque no había un plan de sucesión para la información de su programa de cría?

Businesses of all sizes routinely develop detailed succession plans. This ensures the availability of experienced and capable employees prepared to assume leadership roles as they become available. Succession planning for a breeding program assures that the program’s data, records, observations and pedigrees are organized and readily available to new leadership and breeders. Consequently, the program can continue mostly uninterrupted with minimal transitional cost.

Notas indescifrables

Tener páginas y páginas de notas de campo o un ordenador lleno de archivos de datos de Excel no es una planificación eficaz de la sucesión. Estas colecciones ni siquiera son una fuente de información eficaz. Al final, los obtentores tienen que tomar decisiones millonarias sobre los nuevos híbridos que se liberan y los que se descartan. Lo ideal es que cuenten con la mejor información disponible en una base de datos relacional completa.

An unexpected change in plant breeding leadership can cost thousands of dollars. Reconstructing useable records of R&D data if the information is a hodge-podge of notes and files wastes a lot of time. A new plant breeder may have to spend weeks or even months organizing old data without proper succession planning. Imagine the complications involved in understanding someone else’s Excel files and field notes. And then transferring it, preferably, to a relational database as a more efficient way forward. If there is no one to sort out what has happened the existing data becomes meaningless. A U.S. seed company’s R&D program was recently delayed by one growing season because they had to regrow plants after the succeeding plant breeder was unable to decipher his predecessor’s data. That’s probably a worst-case scenario – but was very costly!

To organize a breeding program’s data into a single relational database will yield benefits even without a change in leadership. Colleagues using the same database can work as a team instead of as individuals working in isolation. Then, any new breeders can more quickly be “up to speed” and fully productive to everyone’s benefit. An organized system will standardize how pedigrees are written, among many other advantages. When marketing inbred lines, an integrated program can immediately provide answers about performance related to a wide variety of environments. Using Excel files or a flat file system will never achieve the same results.

Successful breeding program have many moving parts. Succession planning with a relational database eliminates the risks and costs of not having an integrated data succession plan even before there is an unexpected change in the program’s leadership.

Such changes are inevitable – plan now to minimize the costs.

(Publicado por primera vez como parte de SeedWorld INSIDERS en SeedWorld.commarzo de 2018. Editado en octubre de 2021)

Dieter Mulitze, PhD. es fundador y director general de Agronomix Software Inc.

Agronomix es el desarrollador de Genovix®solución de software líder para la mejora vegetal y análisis de variedadesUtilizado en todo el mundo.