Buzz­words such as meta­verse are not just Sil­i­con Val­ley hype, but also the ques­tion of how to involve employ­ees in a com­pany in this dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, espe­cially against the back­drop of remote work­ing. plazz AG has a solu­tion for this The Erfurt-based com­pany started in 2012 with the devel­op­ment of a mobile event app to dig­i­tally accom­pany events.

An employee app called Polario.app will now bridge the gap to com­mu­ni­ca­tion within the company.

We talk in an inter­view with Jür­gen Mayer, CEO of plazz AG, and Ste­fan Heinz, who as Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer is in charge of “Design and Conception”.

Mr. Mayer, how did you come to plazz AG?

Jür­gen Mayer: I joined the com­pany in 2010 and reor­ga­nized the com­pany and refo­cused it on the topic of “apps”. The size of Erfurt is ideal and we have sev­eral uni­ver­si­ties right on our doorstep, which makes the Thuringian state cap­i­tal very attrac­tive as a loca­tion, espe­cially since it was already known at the time that the new ICE line would be launched at some point.

Cur­rently, our Erfurt team com­prises almost 50 per­ma­nent employ­ees. We still have a loca­tion in Munich, but our head­quar­ters are in Erfurt’s Bahn­hof­s­trasse. Since 2012, we have been able to suc­cess­fully surf along on sev­eral waves — on the one hand, the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion of com­pa­nies, but in the wake of the Corona pan­demic, we also reacted and expanded our solu­tion to include vir­tual and hybrid events with video stream­ing and video con­fer­enc­ing, and now we are ben­e­fit­ing from remote work.

How did it start?

Jür­gen Mayer: We decided to develop an event app based on a no-code sys­tem. This means that our cus­tomers can admin­is­ter every­thing them­selves. We are the extended work­bench and are avail­able with our experts. This was still uncharted ter­ri­tory at the time. Today, the term “no code” is in vogue, but we were one of the first providers in Ger­many with a con­crete offer.

Ste­fan Heinz: At that time, we had received an increas­ing num­ber of inquiries from com­pa­nies that needed an app for their event — prefer­ably within two weeks. But app devel­op­ment takes a long time and is, above all, expen­sive. At the time, we were build­ing an app for the Weimar Eco­nomic Forum. This gave rise to the idea of devel­op­ing a prod­uct from the prod­uct, which we can reuse. This is how the soft­ware ser­vice approach came about, which we have con­tin­ued to work on.

What was your first experience with the app?

Ste­fan Heinz: Dig­i­ti­za­tion was the head­line above every­thing at that time. But you have to imag­ine that 12 years ago, cus­tomers did­n’t even have the expe­ri­ence with such apps. This means that for the cus­tomer we were work­ing for, this was new ter­ri­tory. We picked up our cus­tomers by pro­vid­ing advice and ser­vice, but were also on site at the events. For exam­ple, we checked whether the con­nec­tion of the online vot­ing on the cell phone to the screen tech­nol­ogy worked so that the charts were dis­played on stage. That was an exper­i­men­tal time.

Jür­gen Mayer: No com­par­i­son to today! Nowa­days, the cus­tomer has already gained expe­ri­ence and Corona, of course, was also an accel­er­a­tor of this development.

What has the Corona pandemic done to you?

Ste­fan Heinz: From a prod­uct devel­op­ment per­spec­tive, the pan­demic was an oppor­tu­nity. Pre­vi­ously, an event app was a dig­i­tal extra, so to speak. How­ever, every­thing that was to take place dur­ing the Corona period had to be done dig­i­tally. So our app went from being a medium to the cen­tral plat­form of an event. The focus was sud­denly set dif­fer­ently, which was a great mar­ket oppor­tu­nity for us.

Jür­gen Mayer: First and fore­most, we ben­e­fited from the Corona pan­demic, although down­stream we are cur­rently also feel­ing the con­se­quences of the pan­demic. Employ­ees have become accus­tomed to work­ing remotely. We can no longer get col­leagues into the office five days in a row. That’s not a prob­lem either, but it does cre­ate new chal­lenges in terms of how skilled work­ers nev­er­the­less iden­tify with a com­pany. The high demand for IT work­ers is also putting a strain on us in terms of recruit­ing new employees.

You have developed a solution for this as well. What can the new product do?

Jür­gen Mayer: Com­pa­nies need to pro­vide tools that enable bet­ter employee com­mu­ni­ca­tion. So we have also taken up this issue and offer an app for employ­ees. We have com­pa­nies in our port­fo­lio that have 3,500 employ­ees who receive daily push mes­sages with the lat­est news from the site using our solu­tion. How­ever, this is not only inter­est­ing for col­leagues who work in the home office, but also for employ­ees who do not work in front of the com­puter in the office. You can also reach these peo­ple in pro­duc­tion and the like bet­ter with such apps.

Ste­fan Heinz: The advan­tage of our no-code solu­tion is that we don’t have to arrange with an IT depart­ment to cre­ate com­pli­cated inter­faces. Our prod­uct is easy to con­nect and adapt within two hours. The future admins in the com­pany then receive 60 min­utes of train­ing and can then oper­ate the app com­pletely independently.

How could the bm|t support this?

Jür­gen Mayer: As a share­holder, bm|t is close to us through its seat on our super­vi­sory board. We are also always very happy to attend the Thuringian Investor Days to sup­port the bm|t event with our event solu­tion. We are already very much look­ing for­ward to Investor Days 2023.

Thank you very much for the interview!

You can find more infor­ma­tion about the com­pany at www.plazz.ag