BioVerbeek

How it went

At BioVerbeek between 120 and 150 people work in the greenhouse every day, spread over four sites. Labour is the biggest cost, so pace and quality both weigh heavily.

Ridder Productive gave insight into speed. For quality, parameters had been set for harvesting and leaf breaking, but there was no system to monitor them. Every working foreman had his own checking method. One checked often, another rarely. When something went wrong, one walked back half an hour later, while another only looked again much later or not at all.

That led to discussions about whether checks had been done at all, and direction depended on Lowie himself. As long as he was on top of it daily, quality stayed up; as soon as his attention was elsewhere, it slowly slipped again.

What they were looking for

Structure and uniformity in checking. One way of working that is the same for all foremen, so the standard doesn't depend on who is walking the greenhouse that day.

The trigger was concrete. With the purchase of a fourth site, the question became urgent: how do you still direct that when you can't be there yourself? And the owner wanted to be able to put his attention elsewhere.

They first looked at whether existing suppliers could build it. The question was whether their path registration could be extended with quality checks. None of the options offered fitted, and there was also the wish to be able to set everything up yourself.

What we do now

Connected to Ridder Productive, live since March 2026. In the owner dashboard, management sets how often checks are done, on which points and how quickly a recheck must follow when something goes wrong. That setup was done together with the foremen, to build support for the new way of working.

The foremen get a push notification when someone needs to be checked. If someone scores below standard, the recheck follows automatically. Speed is monitored too, with its own standards per task.

The first weeks took getting used to and of course the programme still had plenty of teething problems. Since then the quality of the work has noticeably improved, with less Botrytis and fewer rejects as a result.

Recently all daily and weekly tasks have been added too, so those are safeguarded as well.