“Business, English style”, or “Two Decades with the Lanner Group”
DYNAMIC FUTURE has been co-operating with the British hybrid software and consulting
company Lanner Group, which specializes in predictive simulation for industrial clients,
almost since its inception. Last year, Lanner transferred to Royal HaskoningDHV, an
independent consulting firm based in the Netherlands, as part of the acquisition. How do
DYNAMIC FUTURE executives perceive the change, and what actually connects them to
Lanner?
The reseller meeting will provide more
information
“We will support you in the development of your business, and thanks to that, you will start
selling our solutions,” describes Jan Šlajer, describing the main building block of the current
partnership with Lanner. And he adds the belief that the Royal HaskoningDHV acquisition
will not affect the top level relations between specialists.
The new executives have already met with the new management, but they assume that not
much will change at the level of middle management, who deal with the projects.
“Communication is going on as before. This year, after three years, a meeting of resellers, i.e.
partners, should be convened. When the invitation comes, we will definitely go to the
Netherlands. As the exclusive distributor of Witness Lanner software for the Czech and
Slovak Republics, we must be in the picture,” says Petr Jalůvka.
First meeting and “some mistakes”
At the beginning of today’s almost twenty-year partnership was a meeting between Jan
Šlajer, Petr Jalůvka, and Tony Waller, Lanner Group’s customer development manager. “At
that time, we worked for the Ironworks and Wireworks in Bohumín, which was the second
company in the country to purchase the Witness Lanner program from Humusoft. We
followed them to Prague and met Tony. When we told him that Witness seemed to have
some flaws, he laughed and said we should describe them to him. So we started. We had
about twenty items ready, when we went through them, Tony got on the hotline to Lanner,
and put to work on the changes,” recalls Petr Jalůvka.
Over time, DYNAMIC FUTURE became a subseller of Humusoft, and because they
successfully sold the first viewers in several applications, and because they built their
business on a dynamic simulation, Humusoft left them as resellers for the Czech and Slovak
Republics in 2012.
Mutual inspiration
“Then we started going to Lanner more. Since we use Witness a lot, we talked about where it
would be good to direct development. Sometimes they took it into account, other times not,
of course. At DYNAMIC FUTURE, we developed the first application called HAPP (Handling
Application), we showed it in Lanner, and I think that’s why they started offering their
applications and moved development to the Internet. Then they were able to offer Witness
as part of a cloud solution, and I am convinced that they were based on our discussions,”
says Jan Šlajer.
DYNAMIC FUTURE worked with Lanner on, among other things, five digital twins for
companies of global importance. He is currently trying to offer his own applications: PREWIT
(PREdiction WIzard Tool) and PPA4.0 (Predictive Planning Applications). They are used to
change and digitize the production planning and management process – from demand
prediction to capacity verification of the production plan.
Good contacts all around the world
Thanks to working with the Lanner Group, DYNAMIC FUTURE executives were able to
connect with resellers in many countries. When needed, they sent them their findings and/or
information about various projects. “For example, Carsten from Germany, who is in charge
of Benelux and Sweden, in addition to his own country, turned to us several times. When he
needed a reference model in the field of logistics, we sent him something about three or
four times, because we had a lot of experience in this area,” explains Jan Šlajer.
And it works the other way around too: When DYNAMIC FUTURE worked in hospitals and
needed reference models, they turned to a colleague in France who had developed a
number of models for hospitals, not only in France, but also in America and the United
Kingdom.
“The atmosphere, not only in Lanner, but also its resellers, has always been very good,
helpful, and open. It’s not a business-only relationship. Of course, we also tried to work with
other suppliers of simulation tools, but they mainly wanted sales. From our point of view,
however, the sale itself was never the most important. This is customer satisfaction. They
don't always only need software, they mainly need a functional solution,” says Petr Jalůvka.
In his opinion, the DYNAMIC FUTURE business has always insisted that if they do their job
well, they will have satisfied customers, and then they will also bring in money. “That’s where
Lanner’s philosophy and mine came together – that money is a secondary effect of a job well done,” says P. Jalůvka.
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