Stabiplan

After working freelance during his student days, Gijs Willem Sloof founded Stabiplan in 1990 in partnership with one of his customers. This partner mainly brought market knowledge to the table. The product that was developed was StabiCAD, a software program that provides an engineer the opportunity to develop, visualize, control and optimize technical installations. The mission of Stabiplan is to help their customers realize better building systems (technical installations within buildings), which can improve the quality and innovativeness, and provide cost savings. The modular design of the software makes it suitable for the different market segments within the installation engineering market. These technical installations can make up as much as half of the building costs in buildings like hospitals and laboratories, making it crucial to have detailed designs for assembling and maintaining these systems. The business partner of Gijs Willem Sloof was bought out in 1997 by which time his market knowledge could not contribute significantly any further. Stabiplan focuses on a customer intimacy strategy, with product leadership a close second on specific occasions. Stabiplan is also active in Belgium, France and Romania and currently has more than 3800 customers that make up over 8500 daily users of the software. Figures 8.1 and 8.2 show the growth of revenue and employees during the history of Stabiplan. It should be noted that the employee numbers are solely Dutch employees and do not include employees abroad (which currently consist of 30 developers in Romania and a dozen other sales employees abroad). This leads to a slightly distorted view.