Learn more about our strategy.
Ambitious goals for high performance.
Our objective is to maintain our position as one of the leading international providers in the market for workforce management software and to set the standard in the field of workforce management.
The key elements of our sales strategy include effective penetration of international markets, successive diversification of our target markets and geographic areas of application for our workforce management solutions and continuing advancement and development of our range of products in order to build upon our existing technological strengths. In addition, we feel that targeted acquisitions of companies and holdings in companies can be an appropriate means of implementing our strategy.
Internationalisation
Since 1999, we have continued the international expansion of our business by successively forming additional foreign subsidiaries and forging sales partnerships abroad. In addition to its headquarters in Germany, the Company has since set up sales and service companies in France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Estonia, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands as well as in the United States and South Africa. In recent years, we have focused our activities primarily on building up local sales and consulting teams, gaining experience in local markets, and successfully acquiring local prestige customers. To expand our business, we intend to continue aggressively penetrating local markets and expanding our local market presence by selectively hiring personnel, expanding our sales agent network and increasing our sales and marketing activities.
Since 2004, we have directed our sales and marketing activities to soliciting pan-European and large international customers in order to be better able to exploit our position as an internationally active provider. In this respect, we benefit from the fact that our software can be deployed across borders and can take into account complex cultural conditions and legal environments in the context of staff scheduling optimisation. In this way, the software may be deployed internationally without an immediate need to make complex adjustments to the software in order to adapt to the specific local environment.
Sector diversification
A general principle of successfully deploying workforce management solutions and, in particular, software-based solutions for highly complex staff scheduling optimisation is that it is not limited to certain industry sectors or companies, to the extent that a larger number of employees are intended to be scheduled. However, the demand for workforce management solutions is highly dependent on whether the (legal) environment in the specific sector or in the specific area of application favours the use of workforce management solutions. The factors that favour the deployment of workforce management solutions include, among other things, the legal and practical ability to undertake flexible employee scheduling, long business hours and hours of operation, high quality of services sought by the user, the desire to increase efficiency potential, and heightened competition for qualified personnel. Because these factors weigh differently in the various countries and in the various sectors, there are currently substantial differences between the individual countries and sectors with respect to the opportunities for broad-based deployment of workforce management systems. In Germany and continental Europe, workforce management systems are currently used primarily by companies that operate call centres (or call centre departments). Additionally, workforce management systems are also being used by retail companies to optimise staff schedules in the context of operating their individual stores, as well as by airport operators and airlines in connection with staff schedule optimisation of ground personnel. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the use of workforce management systems is more wide-spread than in Germany and continental Europe due to a more favourable legal and cultural environment, so that workforce management systems in the above-referenced applications and, above all, in retail, are used to a much greater degree than in Germany and continental Europe. Moreover, other sectors in the US and UK already use workforce management systems. In an effort to achieve early identification and exploitation of other sales potentials, we are closely monitoring the industries and areas of application, which have not used workforce management to-date or which do so, on a very limited basis.
Technology
In the development of our product base, we have carefully focused, and will continue to carefully focus, on ensuring that the developed software solutions for staff scheduling and optimisation can be deployed in various sectors and in various areas of application. We intend in future to offer more special programme versions on this basis that are tailored to the special requirements of individual sectors. These include mapping sector-specific processes in order to thereby strengthen the Company’s competitiveness in certain market segments. InVision also invests in the further development of algorithms to resolve highly complex optimisation problems within workforce management, in an effort to further extend its strong position in this area. In this manner, the Company intends to effectively raise the barriers to market entry for other potential competitors so as to provide effective limits on the competitive field.
Corporate acquisitions and equity investments
To support our strategy, we are considering acquisitions of companies or company divisions with the objective of acquiring promising, complementary technology and expanding our own customer base. Furthermore, acquisitions are also intended to strengthen sales and service capacities.
