HOPLICCS : HORTICULTURAL PLANNING AND INTEGRATED COST CONTROL SYSTEMS

The HOPLICCS consortium has been created in 1997 as a result of common and complementary objectives for intelligent and integrated production planning in Horticulture. Six professional organisations are responsible to achieve the project objectives : OM Partners and OM Partners Hortica (B, Development and Project co-ordination), Wageningen Agricultural University (NL, Integration of Growing Models), Danish Horticultural Association (DK, genericity of the concept), Floreac (B, multi-user greenhouse production), Viveiros Do Foral (P, single-user open air production).

The project aims at transforming business processes, through the development, integration, implementation and commercialization of new information technology in horticulture:

1. The complete and drastic rethinking of the process of planning the production of "horticultural products", will provide a revolutionary new overall management concept.
2. The HOPLICCS overall management concept will enable, through the integration with operational internal (e.g. Management Information Systems, …) and external (e.g. Electronic Commerce, …) information systems, efficient management and planning of horticultural business entities.

As a result of these objectives, the HOPLICCS system will be an integrated overall management and planning tool, available to the end-user, so that every individual horticultural company can take well-founded management decisions (ranging from tactical planning to detailed planning) through advanced calculation (including linear programming, constraint based optimisation techniques and physiological growing models), simulation and what-if analysis techniques. The use of a sophisticated software tool for planning and overall performance measurement purposes will increase the productivity, improve the business processes, enhance and simplify production planning and increase profitability.