Solutions

#intro

We understand how important your research is to you and have developed a solid and reliable system to help you succeed in your research while maintaining a competitive advantage and realizing a return on your investment.

If you are a plant breeder, for example, this means an increase in the probability of developing and releasing a royalty-paying variety or hybrid. Meeting our clients’ needs forms the foundation of our continuous software development.

#software

Software vs Spreadsheets

So, you're still using spreadsheets...

There are still many seed companies that have their breeders use spreadsheet software (such as Microsoft Excel®, Apple iWork Numbers®, LibreOffice Calc®) to manage and analyze their plant breeding data. This is even true of fairly large companies that use expensive software like SAP to run their logistics. Meanwhile, the breeders must develop hybrids and varieties, the ‘lifeblood and future’ of the seed company with spreadsheets. When considering adopting software specially developed for plant breeders, with the effort and investment required, the management of some seed companies resist change. After all, the breeders have developed varieties and hybrids without such specialized software, so do the breeders really need such software? Few seed companies consider the ‘hidden costs’ of limiting their breeders to spreadsheets. This is like saying that we don’t need a computer since a slide rule would eventually get the job done. Breeders might ask “Why should management use accounting software? It could all be done in spreadsheets – costs, sales, payroll, and so forth can all be done on spreadsheets.” That is true! But, company management would immediately object for many reasons – and good reasons too. However, similar reasons apply to plant breeders who are forced to remain ‘confined’ to spreadsheets.

Read on our blog:

The Hidden Costs of Using Spreadsheets for Managing Plant Breeding Data

Using spreadsheets as the plant breeding data management tool comes with substantive, hidden costs.

Licensing Genovix® plant breeding software is really an investment to maintain and increase a seed company`s competitive edge and thus less costly than using spreadsheets.

Genovix is designed to help increase the probability of developing and releasing the best possible hybrid or variety. As competitor hybrids improve, a seed company`s hybrids have to be better still and stay in the market longer. Only the management in a seed company has an idea what that is worth. So what is more costly – using spreadsheets or licensing Genovix?

Surprisingly, spreadsheets are the more costly software when everything is carefully considered. That is reality.

Feel free to contact use for a discovery call of our software and how it can overcome the limitations and hidden costs of spreadsheets and truly strengthen your breeding program.

  • Data vulnerability

    Hundreds of spreadsheets – who controls them, where are they all located, who has access privileges? In most seed companies, data is vulnerable with no firm control. Breeding records are crucial. With Genovix, all the data is in a secure SQL-Server database with access restricted to known users. Pedigrees are hidden if required, and even each experiment or nursery can be ‘locked down’ for each user who accesses the database.

    Serious control for serious data – your data.

  • Lack of Data Standard.

    Are your traits named the same by all breeders for all crops? Are pedigrees written the same way, or left to the imagination or inclination of each breeder? How long will it take a new breeder need to figure out years of data in the past or generations of breeding data? In many seed companies, each breeder decides how he works with spread sheets, and it often seems a bit chaotic, or worse. The lack of a data standard has a ripple effect in the whole company. Trying to implement a data standard for many users of spreadsheets is difficult at best.

    The resulting inefficiencies all take time, and time is money!

  • Data with Errors.

    Names and pedigrees can be entered or copied incorrectly, columns of data cut and paste the wrong way – even one cell off can cause disastrous consequences later. A relational database maintains unique ‘keys’ for each genotype, location, year, etc. Perfect data advance and collection, all the time. In fact, Genovix has very exact and defined import routines so that past data is imported correctly, checked and made unique each time.

    Many new clients are surprised by how many errors appear as past data is carefully imported into a standardized database.

  • Data not connected.

    Maybe you want to find all or some data for a hybrid or inbred – this might take hours or days. In one new client company, a researcher told us it took 2 weeks to get the data he wanted, from all the spreadsheets sheets ‘floating around’. This is time consuming and slows everything down.

    In Genovix – a connected, relational database – this takes seconds and thus speeds up the ability to make decisions.

  • More effort to register hybrids.

    Hybrid registrations typically require a history of their development, all their data, their parents, where planted and tested, and so forth. This takes time when pulling data from many spreadsheets. Sometimes, all the data is not even there or errors are found.

    But in Genovix, this is all done in a few clicks – a huge time saving. This is also true of audits – a possibly stressful time if all the data is in spreadsheets.

  • Time consuming operations.

    Many operations in spreadsheets can be tedious, repetitive. One breeder using our software informed us that what used to take 2 weeks when preparing for the contra season, now took 2 hours.

    Yes, you have to learn the new software, but see it as an investment and once learned, the dividends are huge.

  • Breeders spending too much time working with spreadsheets.

    Breeders and support staff typically spend many hours working with spreadhseets, but has anyone considered the cost in terms of salary? A senior breeder at one large seed company that switched to Genovix stated that he and his colleagues spent about 30% of their time working with spreadhseets to manage their breeding programs. He said this was a huge cost in terms of salaries paid by the company. But even more costly he noted, is the time taken away from working as a breeder in a breeding program and reading scientific papers related to his breeding program.

    Breeders with a PhD should not be spending so much of their time manipulating spreadsheets.

  • Wasted effort.

    Some breeding programs require hundreds of crosses each year. As the years go by, some crosses might be repeated simply because it was forgotten that the crosses were done years ago. Or a new breeder simply cannot easily find out what crosses were done in the past.

    With Genovix, a breeder instantly sees whether a cross was done before or not. No wasted effort.

  • Laborious analyses.

    Opening one spreadsheet after another to analyze data is time consuming. Genovix has a ‘multiple single ANOVA’ facility, where hundreds of experiments and many traits could be analyzed in a matter of minutes. Maybe analyse an entire year’s worth of data for a large seed company in about one hour? Our larger client seed companies enjoy this capability each year. And the means are saved in the database, ready for reports. This is itself a huge time saving, especially when a new season is just around the corner and breeders have to decide on selections and preparing seed for the next planting.

    Breeders should spend time making careful decisions and studying their data, not being bogged down in inefficient ways of data analysis.

  • Archaic analyses.

    The ‘tried and true’ RCBD is statistical technology from the 1920s. Seriously! Biometrics has advanced a lot since then, from incomplete block designs to spatial designs and analyses. Genovix offers such options. Nearest neighbors analyses, for example, will estimate trends and give the most likely genetic ranking of entries for quantitative traits. This results often in lower CVs, LSDs, and different varieties or hybrids being selected. Miss-classification errors are costly. Breeders will promote ‘OK’ hybrids, or maybe sometimes the best, but all too often not the actual best. This has serious consequences, as any breeder can imagine. So why risk the future of your company on 1920s statistical methodology? Because that comes by being limited to spreadsheets. See the scientific papers in Crop Science and The American Statistician co-authored by the CEO of Agronomix Software if there is any doubt in this.

    If one still insists that RCBDs are good enough for the breeders, then accounting programs from the Commodore 64 on floppy diskettes should be good enough for the company’s accountants.

  • Sub-optimal decisions.

    The larger, successful seed companies all use, for example, ‘head-to-head’ analyses, where data from a check hybrid and newer hybrids is pulled from experiments across years and locations to make valid, direct statistical comparisons. With data in spreadsheets, this is laborious and prone to error. Many such comparisons should be done for the most crucial, final decision about which hybrid to release on the market. Is it really the best one? Is it truly adapted where intended? In Genovix, such crucial, strategic comparisons take seconds, and can even be stored to run next year with more hybrids. There is a linear or curvilinear regression display to clearly identity superior hybrid performance. The inability to easily, correctly, and quickly do this puts any seed company at a competitive disadvantage. Management among our client seed companies now routinely require such analyses when making the most critical decisions about hybrid release. This is all about opportunity cost. You never know you decided on the wrong hybrid until it is too late. Why risk your company because you limited your breeders to spreadsheets, instead of a relational database developed expressly for plant breeders? Why not use all your data for such crucial decisions, rather than just the data you can quickly gather together?

    This aspect alone is typically a cost that far exceeds the cost of a software license. All the large seed companies have software that does such analyses using plant breeding database software – is there a connection between their software and their success?

  • Potential legal issues.

    More and more companies are using licensed genes and technologies, with required data audits. Working with spreadsheets makes it harder to prove whether a cross or derived genotype has a licensed gene or genetic construct. With Genovix, such genes or constructs can be linked through the whole relational database to many genotypes thereby satisfying audits and verifying royalty payments. One of our seed company clients remarked how this audit process now takes a few hours when the multinational seed company owner of the patents visits them.

    Before using Genovix, it required days or weeks checking spreadsheets and the breeders were “quite nervous”.

  • Time consuming data upload.

    With hundreds of spreadsheets, it is a real challenge to upload data from the field or laboratory since there is no central database. Our Genovix mobile and Tablet applications lets you take data from the field or laboratory offline and then with Wi-Fi upload the data to the central Genovix SQL database in seconds.

    This could be data from an entire field with a few clicks, and you could be thousands of miles away.

  • Competitive disadvantage.

    There is often a tendency to look at all the varieties and hybrids released as well as one’s current market share and feel that this can only slowly get better. After all, success has come from breeders doing all their work in spreadsheets, and maybe some analysis program on the side. But as any mutual fund salesman will tell you (assuming they are honest!) “past performance is no guarantee of future performance”. The plant breeding world is changing, especially with the technologies involved. Competitor seed companies are adopting more powerful software tools, including plant breeding software.

    Limiting breeders to spreadsheets means that they will fall farther behind in the next years and their seed company will be at an increasing disadvantage with potential loss of market share. This is clear from points 1 to 13 above – and those are only the more obvious points.

  • Potential decreased valuation upon mergers or acquisitions.

    Whenever a merger or acquisition is ever considered for the future of a seed company, the inevitable question is “how much is the germplasm worth” or “what is the seed company worth”? This is not a simple question, and any potential buyer has typical due diligence steps. Valuation becomes more difficult if data is in hundreds of disconnected spreadsheets. Genotype value is more easily demonstrated by reports that take seconds to compile all the performance data across years, locations, or experiments for a genotype or any group thereof.

    With a relational database, this is done in seconds as well as head-to-head comparisons and other analyses to prove the value of any genotype.

#studies

Case Studies

In Their Own Words, What Our Users Say

We have hundreds of clients around the world using AGROBASE Generation II® and now many using Genovix®.

#stories

Success Stories

Photograph of agronomix_op

I have been a user of AGROBASE at the SGI since 1993, the AGROBASE/4 DOS version. It has helped us keep all our data together. Where previously our data was all over all the computers in different file formats in our division, it was now connected to an entry for that specific year in a specific file, experiment or trial. With some power play, the data could be manipulated as I wanted it to analyse or display/print out.

When moving to AGROBASE Generation II – predecessor of Genovix - major problems were eliminated:

  1. Names of traits, entries, localities, etc. needed to be changed only in one place and have it reflected through the whole program instead of searching through all files for the names to be changed.
  2. All the info on an entry is connected over years and localities so that comparisons over years were quite easy to do.

With the development of Genovix, building on what AGROBASE has achieved, Agronomix once again kept their clients’ needs in mind while also looking to the future of agronomy advancements. While Genovix has a steep initial learning curve, the program's methodology makes perfect sense and workflow is quick and easy, thus giving us, the user's, the ability to do a lot of work effectively in the shortest possible time. Since moving the company, that I work for, over to Genovix I have completed work quicker and more effectively than before.

The learning curve of Genovix is eased by the creation of tutorials on every aspect of the software. These tutorials lead the user through the whole procedure of what he or she wants to do or know.
What I enjoy most about Agronomix Software is that they are open to communication with their customers. Any complaint, error reporting or suggestions receive immediate response from them, whether it is from their customer care desk, programmers or Dieter himself -- you will receive a reply!!

I can personally vouch for that as I have made a few suggestions and error reports myself which were incorporated or rectified as soon as their schedule allowed it.

I would strongly advise anybody looking to buy software for their research programs to take a closer look at Genovix as it is still growing and developing with the input from its users and the future views of the company itself.

Diederick Exley

Former Wheat Breeding Technician, Small Grain Institute, ARC

Currently self-employed data analyst for a national seed company

Bethlehem, Republic of South Africa

Photograph of agronomix_op

I’ve been using Genovix for a few seasons and it has become an indispensable tool in my peanut breeding effort. Each year I’ve learned new functions within the program that improve the efficiency of my record keeping and data analyses. I appreciate the intuitive controls and tools that are clearly designed by plant breeders for plant breeders. It has been very easy to generate crosses, set up naming schemes for nursery selections, import field data, generate field books, design and map yield and nursery trials, then analyze the data all in one place.

Nino Brown

Peanut Breeder

University of Georgia

Tifton, GA

Photograph of agronomix_op

My colleagues and I have been using Agrobase and more recently Genovix for the past 15 years to optimise our plant breeding in a range of botanical extracts in Tasmania, Australia. I am always impressed with the speedy response from Agronomix support staff.

Liz Preece

Senior Scientist

Extractas Bioscience

Australia

#researchers

Trusted by Researchers

Researchers trust us and our software, as shown by many scientific references over two decades.

Among North American plant breeders and variety testers at leading universities and government organizations alone there are over one hundred references to our software regarding public variety registration and plant breeding research from the late 1990s. Researchers have trusted data management and analysis with our software to realize the goals of their research. Some universities rely on our software to manage their official variety trials, analyze the results and make the final official reports. A few universities include our software in their graduate plant breeding course. Behind all of this, of course, is our ongoing technical support.

Our PhD support and training staff have authored or co-authored papers in Crop Science, Agronomy Journal, American Statistician, Theoretical and Applied Genetics, Euphytica and Genome. In addition to our staff’s experience in breeding several crops, one of our staff is listed on patents for twenty maize hybrids. Our growing software development team has a staff member with a PhD plus others with BSc and MSc degrees in computer science.

We continue to build on that trust. Our mission is to serve our clients. Their success is the core of our business.