Innosoft has been awarded the Stifterverband’s research seal of approval “Innovative through research”
About Us
Innosoft GmbH was founded in April 1996 by the current managing directors Walter Siepe,
Rainer Goos and Peter Ebbrecht, who two years earlier had been working together at a Hamburg-based mechanical engineering company, where they were searching for an IT solution to optimize processes in service and production. Despite all the progress in information technology, there literally was no software support in the sectors of service, on-site installation and final assembly, a suitable service management system was simply not available for the mechanical engineering industry at that time. So the decision was made to develop such a program on their own, which was then implemented in coperation with the VDMA. The result was the Resource Planning, an IT solution tailored to the needs of the machine builders, which turned out to be a groundbreaking success.
The Resource Planning filled a gap in the market, as many other companies faced similar challenges, and so the three graduate engineers decided to dare the leap into self-employment and combine the decades of experience Walter Siepe had gained as a manager at various machine and plant manufacturers with the computer development talent of the two young colleagues Goos and Ebbrecht. On the basis of this know-how, the conception for a specialized software was created, which simply did not exist in this form yet. At that time, projects were mainly controlled by handwritten notes, a planning board on the wall and spreadsheet systems such as Excel.
After a thorough planning and development phase, Innosoft GmbH was founded in the spring of 1996. The Ministry of Economics, which was convinced of its concept, granted a three-year subsidy. The small team, which initially consisted of four people, recruited more staff through the University of Dortmund. In the first few years, the top floor of a private house served as business and office space. It didn’t take long before the next modules of today’s Service Management System, the core element of which is still Resource Planning, were developed to market maturity in the form of Customer Management and Project Management.
As the number of customers increased, so did the number of employees, so that in autumn 2000 it became necessary to move to a large office building in Dortmund. Innosoft soon occupied all eleven rooms on the top floor, but here, too, the space was soon insufficient due to the great success and the associated increase in staff, which led to the next move in 2009. This time, the decision was taken to move to a spacious office building in Dortmund’s Technology Park, not least because of its direct proximity to the Technical University of Dortmund. Today Innosoft’s employees occupy the majority of the offices on the two upper floors. Innosoft GmbH has a total of 59 permanent employees at its Dortmund location, as well as additional employees in southern Germany, the Netherlands and France.
In all the years of its existence, Innosoft GmbH has always relied 100% on its equity capital and has been in the black every year. To this day, the company has remained true to the original idea of being able to raise the best employees themselves. In 2019, Innosoft still sees itself as an apprenticing company that likes to give young talents from the surrounding area a chance at fair conditions. Many of the employees who are firmly rooted in the company today started their careers here as students or trainees, which is also a reason for the close ties to the company and the collegial working relationship.
The Innosoft Service Management System is now in use all over the world, with a support department and a ticket system available to more than 300 customers for their questions and problems. For some years now, the focus of development has been on web-based solutions such as graphic and geographical resource planning, customer management and customer ticket system with cockpit, dashboard and customer portal or compact field service management apps, with which service technicians can process times, material and expenses via smartphone and conveniently report back offline.