Internorm
Contact
Internorm International GmbH
Ganglgutstrasse 131
4050 Traun
Austria
E-Mail: office@internorm.com
Conclusion
- InLoox PM makes it easy to keep an overview of the resource utilization while managing several projects simultaneously.
- Team members receive reliable updates on changes to the project plan, new tasks and deadlines.
- InLoox PM can be accessed easily and directly from Outlook. Thus, the acceptance for the new system was high from the start.
Quote
“No other product is integrated into Microsoft Outlook that seamlessly, lives up to all of our expectations and is that easy to handle.”
Andreas Kronsteiner
Europe’s leading window brand chose InLoox PM for project management
Internorm, Europe’s leading and largest international window brand also counts among the InLoox customers. The company with headquarters in Traun/Austria, founded in 1931, offers window and door systems which are completely manufactured in-house. By now, Internorm has more than 1.850 employees at three Austrian production sites and branches throughout Europe. The company has a special focus on the fields of innovation and product development. In 2011, the company invested 29 million euros in new manufacturing technologies and created about 80 new jobs in this field.
Successful projects in the fields of innovation and development also depend on suitable software support. Internorm is facing the challenge to manage several projects in these sectors simultaneously while keeping an overview of the resource utilization. The company relies on a procedure which was specifically designed for innovation and development processes at Internorm in order to be able to handle parallel processes with high speed and deploy teams across divisions. Different process stages that are gradually built upon each other are typical for this method. But it also poses big challenges for the respective project managers. When one stage ends, resources are deallocated, when another one begins, new work packages have to be assigned and resources have to be updated reliably on the project plan, tasks and deadlines.
To be able to accomplish this task efficiently, there were several initiatives to implement project management solutions in the company in the past, but these solutions had a very narrow focus on detailed process management. Also, they were too complicated to handle and only suitable for project directors and specialists.
As all employees at Internorm use Microsoft Outlook, it was clear that the groupware was supposed to be expanded to a project platform. During an internet research on this topic, several Outlook-integrated products were found. After a testing phase, the project software InLoox PM of the Munich-based software manufacturer InLoox was the product of choice. “No other product is integrated into Microsoft Outlook that seamlessly, lives up to all of our expectations and is that easy to handle”, concludes Andreas Kronsteiner, head of IT at Internorm. “InLoox PM can be accessed easily and directly from Outlook.” Thus, project team members don’t have the feeling that they have to become acquainted with completely new software and the acceptance for the new system is high.
Internorm started to introduce InLoox PM in December of 2011, and within short time, the software was installed on all clients and all relevant projects were transferred into InLoox PM. In the visual multi-project resources capability and work load overview, project managers at Internorm are able to see the real-time resource utilization across the different projects. When they allocate resources, Outlook calendar appointments are displayed and can be taken into account. The InLoox PM work package feature is often used at Internorm to communicate responsibilities, tasks and deadlines. The work packages are connected with the project plan and can be linked with Outlook appointments and tasks. Team members can give feedback about accomplished work packages and their time expenditures without any extra effort. Hence, all employees who use InLoox PM can document their activities comfortably and completely.
"Our initial experience with InLoox PM is very positive. InLoox PM has facilitated our multi-project management a lot and the consequent Outlook integration made it very easy to introduce InLoox to our company”, says Herbert Hochreiter, head of technology development at Internorm and responsible for the technical introduction, in his first conclusion. At the moment, 80 employees at Internorm use InLoox PM.