Lanner Group Ltd

Lanner Group Ltd
Private Limited company
Founded 1996 (following a management buyout from AT&T Istel)
Headquarters Henley-in-Arden, United Kingdom
Key people
 Ken Briddon, non-executive chairman; David Jones, CEO; Andrew Aitken, COO[1]
Website www.lanner.com

Lanner Group Ltd is a discrete event simulation software company headquartered in Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire. The business develops, markets and supports business process simulation and optimisation systems.[2][3] The company has subsidiaries in the USA, China, France and Germany and a distributor network selling the company's products in 20 different countries.[4] Lanner Group was formed following a Management Buyout of AT&T Istel, a spin-off from the operational research department of British Leyland where, in 1978, the world's first visual interactive simulation tool was developed.[5] Lanner Group services automotive, aviation, criminal justice, defence and aerospace, financial services and contact centres, food and beverage, health, logistics and supply chain, manufacturing, nuclear, oil and gas, pharmaceutical, and consumer health industries.[6]

Company history

Lanner Group formed in 1996 after completing a Management Buyout from AT&T Istel;[2] the company was initially named SEE WHY SOLUTIONS and was incorporated in 1995.[6] Lanner Group's previous owner, AT&T Istel, formerly known as ISTEL, was initially called BL Systems, and was a spin out formed in 1979 following a Merger of all the computer departments under the then British Leyland umbrella. BL System's SEE WHY tool, programmed in Fortran 77[7] and launched in 1980,[2] was the world's first commercially available visual interactive simulation package and the precursor to Lanner Group's current core software product WITNESS.[8][9] WITNESS was the first of the industrial strength 4GL simulators.[10] The WITNESS system was launched on IBM PC in 1986[2] and has been revised frequently since.[2][11][12] The latest version of Lanner's Witness Power with Ease 3.0 was released in November 2010.[13]

The applications of the FORTRAN 77 / WITNESS interface have been subject to further academic Research and Development.[14][15] Since 1985 the company has supported its simulation software academic program. Over 100 universities worldwide have been involved since the program began.[16]

Lanner Group continued to develop the WITNESS platform further in parallel to developing its mainstay product of the same name, and since 2002 has introduced new systems providing niche simulation packages for police and healthcare organisations called PRISM and PX-Sim respectively.[2][3] In 2006 the company unveiled a Java based simulation engine called L-SIM which is embedded in Business Process Management (BPM) solutions software.[17] In May the same year, a technology partnership with BPM solution provider IDS Scheer was announced.[18] The L-SIM product is now the simulation engine of IDS Scheer's ARIS Business Simulator.[19] The company's WITNESS platform technology is therefore embedded into current Oracle, SAP, and IBM BPA products.[20]

From 1996 to 2010 the company's main investor was private equity company 3i. On 18 March 2010 Lanner Group announced that it had secured a £3 million new investment deal with NVM Private Equity replacing 3i.[21] 3i continues to retain an interest in Lanner Group as a small minority investor.[4]

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ Companies House Register WebCheck
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Lanner Group Company History Page
  3. 1 2 "West Midlands ICT Case studies 2009". Retrieved 18 September 2010.
  4. 1 2 "3i Investment portfolio". Retrieved 9 September 2010.
  5. ↑ Hollocks, BW (2006). "Forty years of discrete-event simulation-a personal reflection". Journal of the Operational Research Society. 7: 1383–1399. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602128.
  6. 1 2 "Lanner Group Limited" [company overview]. Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg.com. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  7. ↑ Allen MJ (29 January 2008). "Programming Language Benchmarks". Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  8. ↑ Gilman AR, Billingham C (1989). "A tutorial on SEE WHY and WITNESS" (pdf). Proceedings of the 21st conference on Winter simulation. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery: 192–200. doi:10.1145/76738.76761. Retrieved 16 September 2010.
  9. ↑ Diamond R, Harrell CR, Henriksen JO, Nordgren WB, Pegden CD, Rohrer MW, Waller AP, Law AM (2002). "Current and future status of simulation software (panel)". Proceedings of the 34th conference on Winter simulation: exploring new frontiers. Winter Simulation Conference: 1633–1640.
  10. ↑ Enstone LR, Clark MF (April 2006). "BPMN and simulation" (pdf). Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  11. ↑ Lanting Lu (May 2009). "Modelling breakdown durations in simulation models of engine assembly lines, PhD thesis" (pdf). School of Mathematics, University of Southampton. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  12. ↑ Staff Reporter (26 August 2010). "Lanner's Witness simulation software gets new licence manager". Works Management News. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  13. ↑ Brothersoft News (12 November 2010). "Latest Edition of WITNESS Software Released: Allows Any Business to Optimize Process Performance with Simulation Software – Fast". brothersoft.com. Retrieved 25 January 2011.
  14. ↑ Rotab Khana MR, Harlock SC, Leaf GA (1 December 1999). "Computer simulation of production systems for woven fabric manufacture". Computers & Industrial Engineering. 37 (4): 745–756. doi:10.1016/s0360-8352(00)00009-7.
  15. ↑ Goyal SK, Mehta K, Kodali R, Deshmukh SG (1995). "Simulation for analysis of scheduling rules for a flexible manufacturing system". Integrated Manufacturing Systems. 6 (5): 21–26. doi:10.1108/09576069510093442.
  16. ↑ "Simulation modeling software company Lanner Group partner Ingram school of engineering". Materials Handling World Magazine. 5 July 2010. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  17. ↑ Waller AP, Clark MF, Enstone LR (2006). "L-SIM : Simulating BPMN Diagrams with a Purpose Built Engine". Proceedings of the 2006 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC 06). Winter Simulation Conference: 591–597. ISBN 1-4244-0500-9.
  18. ↑ "IDS Scheer and Lanner announce partnership for Java based business process simulation". IDS-Sheer.com. Retrieved 21 November 2010.
  19. ↑ Bob Violino. "BPM: 3 Vendors To Watch". CIO Zone. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  20. ↑ "Lanner Group company website 'Business Partners' page". Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  21. ↑ Brian Tinham (22 March 2010). "Lanner Group secures new funding with NVM to execute growth plans". Works Management news. Retrieved 23 October 2010.

External links

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