2. How does process technology help this operation to achieve its objectives? VBA is the largest flower auction operation in the world. It consists of two main parts. The first is the sellers area known as the ‘auction section’ where flowers are received, held in cooled storage areas and auctioned. The second is the ‘buyers’ section’ where around 300 buyers, exporters and wholesalers rent space to prepare flowers for shipment. Trucks leave Aalsmeer every working day with destinations (including airports) throughout Europe. On a typical day there are about 10,000 people working at the centre (1800 of whom work directly for VBA), together handling 17 million cut flowers and two million plants. This large and complex operation is held together by its information processing technology.

Flowers are extremely perishable, so dealing with them in such large quantities makes speed, accuracy and dependability of the operation critical. During the evening and overnight, flowers are brought into the operation in standard containers that are subsequently handled in standard wheeled cages (there are over 124, 000 of these ‘trolleys’ in circulation – see picture). Each lot of flowers is assigned a reference number, VBA staff makes a quality inspection and a description is entered on the ‘delivery forms’ attached to each trolley. The trolleys are then held in cold storage until they are collected for the auctioning process the following morning.