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Spreading Joy Throughout the World, One Flower at a Time – Royal FloraHolland Uses Machine Learning on AWS to Evolve its Practices
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Machine Learning
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Predictive Maintenance
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
The Challenge
Royal FloraHolland, a century-old company, recognized the importance of going digital to provide its growers and buyers with more opportunities. The company wanted to improve current processes and provide growers and sellers with new opportunities to reach buyers. The company recognized its need to reorganize in order to go digital and become more data-driven. Royal FloraHolland wanted to use other trading methodologies outside of the physical auction house to sell flowers. The company also wanted to improve the quality of the images that are presented at the auction and provide buyers with stock availability and alternative options tailored to their preferences.
About The Customer
Royal FloraHolland is a Netherlands-based company that connects buyers and sellers around the world through its online trading platform Floriday and its world-famous live floral auctions. The company is the world’s largest flower auction company and has been organizing the international marketplace for flowers and plants for growers and buyers for over 100 years. The company brings supply and demand together for an optimal price and low transaction costs and supplies the world with fresh flowers and plants every day. The flower auction at Aalsmeer, a Royal FloraHolland location, is the world’s largest trading center for plants and flowers.
The Solution
Royal FloraHolland chose to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and use it to deploy all future applications built in its digital greenhouse. The company built a team to support its digital transformation and partnered with Xebia, a partner with data science and AWS expertise, to help educate its growing data science team and identify use cases in which well-trained deep learning models could drive better business decisions. Xebia helped Royal FloraHolland build a sophisticated container architecture on AWS. The company created an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) platform using Docker microservices. All workloads on AWS are deployed using automated deployment pipelines and AWS CloudFormation. The company is using microservices and Amazon SageMaker to build models and drive new insights.
Operational Impact
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