Managing Interior Design Projects with Planzone : a User Story from SM Design

Sybille de Margerie, a well-known interior designer founded her company SM Design with the idea of “modernizing a very traditional sector, using charm, colour and elegance to incorporate technology into her designs, achieving harmony without sacrificing comfort”.

Her philosophy of "be simply creative" was the idea that spurred her to start SM Design 22 years ago.

In view of the number of interior architecture/interior design projects she has handled, SM Design has clearly fullfilled her objectives.

With a team of a dozen employees, SM Design has projects in Europe, Middle East, the Mediterranean, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Pacific and North America.

Given the scale and number of projects of the company, it was necessary to find a tool that could assist and coordinate the efforts of each and every team member.

Previously used planning software was inflexible, relatively complex and no longer met the needs and expectations of SM Design.

The challenge, in finding a different software was not to create new forms of internal organization, but to adapt and incorporate existing work into a new tool, both easy to access, that everyone could use and that would be conducive to collaboration.

Through an external partner SM Design discovered Planzone and chose to incorporate our software at the core of their daily activities, especially the organization and planning of projects.

Planzone proved an appropriate choice because it includes/enables:

• the management of all projects with a single tool
• integrates simple timesheets for each project
• planning of the major phases and milestones of the projects
• the multi-project overview making it easier to ensure their smooth execution
• centralization of information and availablity to each team member

Nearly a year after the introduction of Planzone, the SM Design team has been able to set up project templates that are re-used for new projects. This ensures the company processes are automatically integrated into these new projects and improvements are saved in the templates.

For example, documents are no longer placed on the internal server but are systematically added to the relevant project in Planzone.

Today, every interior design project is a Project in Planzone: the decoration of a hotel, home, restaurant, etc..

SM Design uses Planzone both internally and with outside partners and sometimes even with subcontractors.

Clients are invited into projects as visitors so they can follow the progress of the various stages of the project and the research undertaken by SM Design.

Some tasks of their projects are even assigned to the visitors eg: validating a stage of a project.
Since introducing Planzone SM Design has noticed several advantages:

• Better overview of their activities
• increase in productivity
• Time saving as things can be easily accessed and everyone knows how to find them
• more homogeneous internal organization thanks to the use of Templates incorporating the Companies processes that allow common milestones to be established for all kinds of projects.

We thank SM Design for their cooperation and the time they have taken toshare their story with us.

Your Planzone Team