Developed by SELDA Informatica and expert agronomists in the sector, this management software dedicated to companies with their own greenhouses that produce proprietary plants is already used by the most significant Italian horticultural companies and is also available in a multilingual version for foreign companies.
SELDA and winTutor®IRIS: a history of innovation and attention to the needs of the sector
SELDA is a software and services company based in Ascoli Piceno that boasts 45 years of activity in the sector, which has now become an established reality with departments dedicated to management, Business Intelligence, and mobile solutions.
The winTutor®IRIS adventure starts from the specialization in the area of business management software, as the Commercial Director and founding member of the company Pasquale De Angelis tells us: "For over a decade, we had seen through one of our customers in the Marche region that for the nurseries in the horticultural sector there was no native software that met their specific needs, but only various customizations that generally took place within the classic administrative management they used."
"After careful research at a national level, we were lucky enough to discover that some agronomists from Abruzzo - specialized in the sector - had actually distributed the first native software on a PC with a DOS operating system of the time."
"This software - which they had called IRIS - was already installed as a single user solution in various national realities, but the fact that these agronomists were not computer scientists by profession had brought the project to a dead end."
"However, we managed to acquire this program - together with the IT professional who had written it - and to rewrite it completely with a new modern "object-oriented" language, finally integrating it into our winTutor® management software, which was already born in a multi-user version, native to Windows and with a relational database in the light of the new technologies of the time."
"This is how the new solution for this specific sector called winTutor®IRIS was born."
Peculiarities and advantages of a cutting-edge tool
"It must be said that - continues De Angelis - in addition to the predominantly technological innovations, given our experience as SELDA in the metalworking production sector, we have introduced the concept of 'Bill of Materials' in agriculture, or rather in a production cycle that no longer has nothing to do with mechanical parts, but with living plant organisms."
"Since this is a sector that falls within the primary economy, we immediately took care to guarantee traceability starting from the seed to the single production lot, highlighting in advance the failures to ensure safety and higher production quality of the seedlings, then completing all the obligations by law up to the Green Passport."
"By doing so, we were able to evolve and grow one of the few programs - if not the only one - native to this sector, immediately giving continuity to those customers who had the old single-user version and gradually winning new ones throughout the national territory."
"Today, winTutor®IRIS is present in over 40 companies in the horticultural sector in all regions of Italy, including the islands of Sicily and Sardinia."
The Sicilian example as an inspiration for the management software
"A separate discussion - De Angelis tells us - deserves Sicily, which in the horticultural sector, especially in the eastern area of the province of Ragusa with areas such as Vittoria, Scicli, and Modica, represents one of the most advanced realities in the world."
"In modern agriculture, only cereals are sown, while garden products such as tomatoes, melons, watermelons, salads, courgettes, peppers, aubergines, etc., require the purchase of seedlings from specialized nurseries, thus ensuring higher yield and quality agricultural or vegetable production."
"It was the Sicilians who implemented the grafting technique to strengthen some species, and the management of this particular cycle has been present for over a decade in our winTutor®IRIS solution."
A look beyond the border
"SELDA - continues De Angelis - now with a privileged observatory of over 40 client companies in the horticultural sector, among the most important at a national level, continues to heavily invest in this sector, releasing important innovations and improvements every year."
"All this has made winTutor®IRIS a powerful and intuitive solution, capable of covering all the major needs of the company quickly and easily and ensuring precise control over costs and all the most important business processes. The new Business Intelligence module has already been included for some time, thanks to the collaboration with Qlik®. Control "Dashboards" have been created to help entrepreneurs with not only making important decisions but also being able to make predictive analyses."
"Being Italy, as already mentioned, at the world vanguard in the horticultural sector, and having conquered the national leadership, for some years, our software solution has been internationalized and is used by one of the most important tomato nurseries in California and from an important Russian group on the border of Georgia," concludes De Angelis.
For more information:
Pasquale De Angelis (Sales Director, SELDA)
+39 348 2723056
p.deangelis@selda.net
www.selda.net