Horti Scouting Plant Quality Control App for Greenhouse Scouting

The project

Our client, Vireõ, runs 10 plant nurseries where 12 scouts walk around checking for pests. The problem? All of this was tracked across excell spreadsheets, which one person had to manually piece together every week to figure out a treatment plan. Super time-consuming, easy to mess up, and basically hard to get a quick overview of what’s going on across all the nurseries.

We built an interactive digital map of the nurseries where scouts can report pests, sticky trap data, and treatments right from their phone or laptop, straight from the greenhouse floor. Admins get to see everything and approve reports before they go live, while scouts only see their own nursery (so no need to worry about permissions getting mixed up). We also added history/overview pages so management can actually see trends over time instead of digging through old spreadsheets.

No more manually stitching spreadsheets together every week. Scouts get an easy way to log what they find, and the admin gets a clear, centralized view to plan treatments faster and with way less hassle. Role-based access also means nobody sees data they shouldn’t, and everything’s logged, so it’s easier to trust and trace what’s happening across the nurseries.

The customer

Our client was Vireõ, a company that runs 10 plant nurseries (greenhouses) across the Netherlands, covering over 40 hectares in total. They import, grow, and sell tropical houseplants, and they’re committed to using bio-control instead of pesticides where possible. We mainly worked with Alex, who’s in charge of planning treatments across all the nurseries, and Johan Winter, the Order and Quality Manager.

We had bi-weekly meetings with the client to walk through progress and get feedback on changes. In the beginning we started sending over visual mockups and a shared Google Doc ahead of meetings, that way they could react to what it would look like rather than trying to picture it from a description. It made a big difference in the meetings since they came in already knowing what to expect and could give more concrete feedback. We also visited the greenhouses in person, which helped a ton with actually understanding how scouts and admins work day-to-day.

The team

Dani was Project Manager, maintaining the backlog, sprint planning, and ensuring items met the Definition of Ready/Done. Ewelina was Scrum Master and led client communication. Xiao, Xiaoyuan, Maria, and Senna worked as developers across both frontend and backend.

Work was split per sprint using GitHub issues, broken into smaller sub-issues as the project progressed. We collaborated through weekly SCRUM meetings, working on separate branches and merging via pull requests, which were automatically tested through our CI pipeline.

Early on, code wasn’t merged into main often enough, which slowed collaboration — we fixed this by committing more consistently once CI was set up. We also lost a finished feature to a computer crash before it was committed, and dealt with slower progress during exam periods, both of which we adapted around.

Delivering a fully working system for a real company, and knowing it will reduce the manual effort Vireõ currently spends on tracking pests and planning treatments. Turning a real operational problem into a working, tested product is what we’re most proud of.

The technologies

Languages:

• JavaScript - used across both frontend and backend of the application

Important frameworks and libraries:

• React - frontend framework used to build the user interface
• Node.js - backend runtime used to build the server and API
• Vite - build tool and development server for the frontend
• Jest - automated testing framework used for unit and integration tests

Database:

• PostgreSQL - relational database used to store and manage application data