Bejo Mexico

CASE STUDY

Bejo

Bejo is a leading global enterprise with 1,800 employees active in 100 countries. The company focuses on innovative research to address the needs of early-stage agricultural markets. Together with their partners, they work with over 1,200 varieties across 50 different crops.

Bejo Mexico specializes in vegetable seeds and uses QuickTrials to streamline the operation of the many variety trials that are conducted each year. On-farm trials are performed in Mexico, with Adrián Carvajal Alvízar who is responsible for trial creation, analysis and coordi-nation. The trial results and collected data are shared with breeders in Guatemala and Holland.

Crops trialed

Jalapenos
Bell peppers
Tomatoes
Cucumber
Lettuce

Carrots
Onions
Cauliflower
Celery
Raddish

Before

Before switching to QuickTrials, paper and excel sheets were the primary means of capturing trial data from the different plant breeders and partners. This was a time-consuming process and nobody liked to transcribe the stacks of paper-based measurements into Excel. Since people were usually busy with other tasks it often took months before all of the data was fully collated for a trial.

Another problem was that any transcrip-tion or measurement errors were only seen late in the process. When it came to analysis, comparing data between differ-ent trials was a headache since separate Excel sheets had to be chased up and referenced, which took time and usually required copying data manually.

Increase in datacollected

100% increase in the number of data properties being cap-tured

Breeders now start calling me for the results as soon as the trial ends. Before it would take months before we even had data

Adrián Carvajal Alvízar

Time to create and distribute new trials

After

With the introduction of QuickTrials things improved greatly. It initially took a bit of time to understand how everything worked, but once the first couple of trials had been defined everything flowed swiftly. Now instead of taking days to set-up and distribute a new trial, it can all be done in 10-20 minutes. In fact, sometimes Field Staff will call up Adrián while they are traveling to a site and he will create a new trial that is then synced and ready on their mobile devices when they arrive.

The amount of data being collected by Bejo Mexico has also increased. In the past, there were 8 traits that were collected for a typical tomato trial. Now, because it’s so easy to enter data with QuickTrials, Bejo Mexico is

capturing 15-16 traits for tomato trials, plus GPS coordinates and photos. That means there is additional data available for analysis (more insights!), with less effort required for capturing the data since it no longer needs to be transcribed.

The effort to transfer and collate data has also been completely reduced, saving every-one’s time. Breeders no longer need to be chased up as their data is immediately available in QuickTrials as soon as it’s been entered in the field. In some trials, it used to take a couple of months after a trial had finished, before the data was collected and ready for analysis. Now with QuickTrials, the whole data set is immediately available for analysis on the day the trial ends.

Time to collect trial results

The company [QuickTrials] is very responsive and fast at adapting to our needs!

Adrián Carvajal Alvízar

Bejo Mexico uses Microsoft’s Power BI to quickly generate any kind of reports that are needed. The QuickTrials data warehouse combined with the direct integration of Power BI with Google BigQuery gives Bejo Mexico very powerful analysis capabilities.

New reports can now be created with a few clicks and data is already being used in new ways, for example, to compare traits across different trials or time periods. Thanks to QuickTrials the data is now centralized and structured ideally for analysis, opening up more possibilities for Bejo Mexico to gain insights from its trials. This helps the team come up with new ideas for various experiments which in turn leads to further innovation for Bejo Mexico.

We can now analyze data in ways that was not possible before