Building owners today face a landscape like never before. Challenges and opportunities are presenting themselves not just around political and economic issues, but also new legislation, changing working preferences and hot topics such as energy and climate change. Not to mention an unforeseen worldwide pandemic as well. Organizations must be empowered to respond appropriately to these emerging challenges while still working to achieve their core ambitions. In this blog I will explain how Planon solutions can streamline, automate and digitize the business processes around buildings, people and assets and how we are now expanding our ecosystem with platform partners.
To keep up with the rapid pace of digitization and innovation in the world of real estate and facility management, organizations should look for an IWMS with an open platform architecture. This type of open platform IWMS functions as an integrator between technology and business. So, it allows organizations to continuously adopt new technologies AND ensure they can be integrated with existing core processes within a single source of truth.
Technological advancements and the increasing availability of data mean that workplace management is changing faster than ever. Planon saw that the industry was maturing, so we started working on significantly restructuring and upgrading our offering accordingly. Planon’s strategy to enhance the openness of the Planon Universe platform has captured the attention of the integrated technology market and has created great opportunities for new partnerships from which our customers can benefit.
With our open platform, Planon partners can develop specialized integrations (called “connectors”), apps and other products and/or features to ensure compatibility with Planon’s existing software solutions. This enables our customers to benefit from the advantages of a single platform with the very latest specialist software across all areas of their business.
Customers have full control over the connectors or solutions they buy from Planon. The hardware and software are guaranteed to work – both now and in the future. If you ask me, another benefit of the partner network is that product development is faster and more scalable. We now have the choice of whether to build a connector ourselves or work with a partner to build it – whichever route makes it available for our customers faster.
Sensor technology is one example of an area where Planon is working with several platform partners. There are various reasons to equip workplaces with sensors, such as to measure temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide levels, as well as occupancy. The more sensor technology partners we work with, the stronger our offering, so our customers can benefit from using our platform and can connect using their choice of sensors. A great example of a Planon partnership is MazeMap for wayfinding. The connector allows floorplans of buildings in the Planon solutions to be overlaid with MazeMap wayfinding, which is particularly relevant for large sites such as production facilities or universities.
Another Planon partner, AddOnn was able to quickly build CleanOnn, a “cleaning solution”, on top of our product to a high standard thanks to its own expertise combined with Planon’s open platform strategy. Other innovative partner projects currently include a connector for smart mousetraps which enables the Planon IWMS to monitor the traps and issue a notification if they are activated. This saves a lot of time in food warehouses and distribution centers, because the traps will no longer need to be checked manually .
The Planon ecosystem already includes more than 40 platform partners, with new partners being onboarded on a weekly basis – and sometimes Planon customers become partners too. Thanks to the open-access nature of our platform, customers can now make their connectors available for other customers. This is just the beginning. When you can combine fantastic technology partners with an innovative customer base on the same platform the collaboration and resulting solutions will only continue to bring positive change to our whole Planon community.
