Planon

Planon was founded in 1982 as a construction consultancy company, at which time the company was called Guelen Project Maintenance. As a recently graduated structural engineer, Pierre Guelen drew up architectural plans, renovation applications and supervised renovations for the first three years. When a big assignment for the development of a maintenance plan arose, Pierre Guelen made this plan using spreadsheets on one of the first computers, on which he later wrote a program to perform the same activities as the spreadsheets performed. This resulted in an increase in customers, until one of the customers, Phillips, asked him to extend the functionalities of the software. Pierre Guelen hired a programmer to develop a mouse-controlled software program, still in the DOS environment. This resulted in a transformation from a construction consultancy company into a software company, approximately five years after Guelen Project Maintenance was founded. This initiated a growth process, as more developers and sales employees needed to be hired. The four solutions that are currently delivered by Planon — maintenance management solutions, smart workplace solutions, corporate real estate solutions and integrated services management solutions — are combined in the term Integrated Workplace Management Solutions (IWMS): software focused on, and supportive of, the workplace management within a company. With more than 1300 customers worldwide, Planon has offices in Belgium, the UK, France, Germany, India and the United States, which provide roughly 60 percent of their revenue, the remaining 40 percent coming from the Netherlands. Figures 16.1 and 16.2 show revenue and employee growth for Planon starting from 1995.