Fortuna Düsseldorf will continue its cooperation with Venue Planner in the 2023/24 season. "As a partner from the very beginning, we want to continue our positive and constructive cooperation with Venue Planner. The regular exchange helps us to constantly improve our planning and to adapt it to the current circumstances," says Sven Mühlenbeck, Director Organization and Match Operations of Fortuna Düsseldorf.
Rainer Schüler from Venue Planner: "We are very pleased that the partnership with Fortuna Düsseldorf will be continued. We are now entering our fourth season with Fortuna. The regular exchange also helps us to further optimize the various aspects of planning for Bundesliga matches."
With Venue Planner, organizers, operators, authorities plan even complex events in no time. Venue Planner runs in the browser and is easy to use thanks to its intuitive interface. Planning and especially personnel costs are noticeably reduced and transparency is increased.
The street carnival offers many challenges for the event industry, especially in the days from Old Thursday to Rose Monday, and especially in the carnival strongholds such as Mainz, Cologne or Düsseldorf, but also opportunities for use.
The Comittee Düsseldorfer Carneval e.V. is the umbrella organization of the carnival in Düsseldorf and responsible for the "organization" of the foolish days. The CC plans the course of the individual events, such as the Sunday "Kö-Treiben". The highlight is traditionally the Rose Monday parade. The Venue Planner software was used for the position planning of personnel and material: Personnel positions, tents and other setups were intuitively planned in the browser.
Furthermore, requirements from the security concept made it necessary to visualize the live course of the Shrove Monday procession in the situation center. Together with the Meerbusch-based company PanStreet International, we were able to implement this requirement: About 300 participants of the Shrove Monday procession installed an app from PanStreet on their phones for this purpose, the location data was received in the PanStreet data center and also forwarded to Venue Planner for output. After only a few days of joint interface programming and during the "endurance test" on Altweiber Thursday, we found that the transmitted live data could be visualized very well on the Venue Planner platform.
So on to the next step: the operation at the Shrove Monday procession. As early as 8 a.m., the coordination group consisting of police, fire department, security service, Rheinbahn and the Comittee Düsseldorfer Carneval had met in the city hall under the chairmanship of the Competence Center Events of the City of Düsseldorf. On the second floor of Düsseldorf City Hall, enough screens and a beamer had been set up to allow the group to discuss possible situations or measures.
On some screens the planning of the locks, the areas and the train route could be seen in the Venue Planner, on other screens different icons moved along the train route in 15-second intervals and thus depicted the current live locations of the different train sections. And this over a period of 6 hours!
The feedback on the visualized live data in combination with the planning of the event in terms of personnel and material was consistently positive. The graphic visualization of the live data saved unnecessary calls during the operation, and the train line was gradually reopened to traffic.
The "foolish days" were more than informative for the further development of the live tool. Future fields of application are, for example, the live display of traffic densities or the concrete position of buses or streetcars or the visualization of sensor data combined with the event planning already created in Venue Planner.
The Venue Planner software is now available at the VfL Bochum 1848 GmbH & Co. KGaA in use. As an application for the creation of position plans and for use and further development in interaction with the security service provider, Venue Planner will help to link the individual areas of security planning.
Pascal Langer, Head of Matchday Organization from VfL:
"We feel the need to plan a game day as dynamically as it really is. This means that there is not just 'the one condition' that we need to consider in our planning, but many different ones. Using Venue Planner allows us to update and push our planning further in terms of security and position planning."
Rainer Schüler, Managing Director VP Venue Planner GmbH:
"We are delighted to have won VfL Bochum as another professional club as a customer who has recognized the various possible applications and the benefits of digital security and event planning."
Touchdown in Mexico.
As one of nine companies, we were able to introduce our product to the guests invited by the German-Mexican Chamber of Commerce at the beginning of the delegation trip in Mexico City. Afterwards, our guests had the opportunity to talk to us directly. After the evening reception with guests from the German Embassy and the Mexican Football Association, the following two days saw further discussions with local authorities, event organizers and the trade fair in Mexico City.
Historic sports site we have visited in the last two days. One was the Olympic Stadium and the Aztec Stadium. They are both getting on in years, but both are still used almost every weekend for American soccer or soccer. Only Atzeken Stadium is slated for the 2026 FIFA World Cup - extensive renovation work will also take place here starting this summer. It may also be that Atzeken Stadium markets its naming rights for the first time in its long history.
We spent the last two days of the Mexico trip together with the delegation in Monterrey. We visited the modern police station of Monterrey, met the German consul Fritz Eisele Thurau, had dinner with the mayor of Guadalupe Maria Cristina Diaz and of course visited the stadium in Monterrey / Guadalupe. One of the three venues for the FIFA World Cup 2026.
It was a great trip to a great country. We saw many opportunities and I am sure we will stay in touch with the people we met. Thank you to AHK Mexico | CAMEXA and to all the companies that accompanied us, such as Advancis Software & Services, AIRSENSE Analytics® GmbH, GEUTEBRUCK GmbH, our partners from Lufthansa Industry Solutions, ESRA GmbH, ISN International Security Network GmbH, Magnetic Autocontrol GmbH and MOVETOS.
New year - new tool. On the Venue Planner homepage, you can now easily calculate what you spend per year on security personnel. For this purpose, Venue Planner has programmed a slider that contains all relevant parameters, for example:
- Number of events per year
- Number of personnel per event
- Duration of operation of the personnel
So you can easily and quickly get an overview, but also see that you can save money when using Venue Planner!
Trying it out saves - go to the savings calculator here!
Once again, this was a very successful event. As in previous years, the IBIT symposium in Cologne became the industry meeting place for live entertainment planners.
We would like to thank IBIT - International Training Centre for Crowd & Safety Management, especially Melanie Wirth-Biesen, Sabine Funk, Lioba Steinhoff and Ralf Zimme from the "best team in the world".
We had good, interesting and valuable discussions with representatives from Fortuna Düsseldorf, Eintracht Frankfurt, Roskilde Festival, Wacken Open Air, Hamburg Messe und Congress GmbH, Messe Leipzig, Special Security Services Deutschland SSSD GmbH, Munich Security Services GmbH, Safesight, Vasibeko, Tilman Albrecht, eps group worldwide, YES Group - Yourope Event Safety Group, Bundesverband Veranstaltungssicherheit, Yvonne Mahling and Kölner Sportstätten GmbH.
Thank you for visiting our booth!
Thanks to all who were there. And to all who were not there: You missed something!
Our article in the "Behördenspiegel"
The November 9, 2022 newsletter of Behördenspiegel features a lengthy guest article on the benefits of digital planning - even in the public sector. An area that will appeal to municipal planners in particular:
After the company Venue Planner from Düsseldorf has attracted attention in recent years, especially in the Bundesliga and the live music market, it is now opening up to municipalities. Venue Planner's software digitizes the planning of event personnel as well as material. Thus, carnival parades, shooting festivals or Christmas markets can be planned easily and safely with the software. "It is particularly worthwhile for municipalities," reports Rainer Schüler, one of the two founders of Venue Planner. "Our customers can graphically create personnel position plans, set up tasks and set-ups of an agile event in a time-dependent manner- and incorporate these essential components into the security concept - for any conceivable event in public space."
To the article in full length here click.
The "German Security Tech Consortium for FIFA World Cup 2026 (North America)" consists of 9 German security companies that will travel to North America several times between 2023 and 2025.
The goal of the project is to give participating companies the opportunity to explore the North American target market, become part of a strong, lasting industry network, and participate in preparations for the 2026 FIFA World Cup in North America.
The three-year program is funded by the Market Entry Program for SMEs of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Policy (BMWK). It is organized by GACC South - representing the German-American Chambers of Commerce in North America (USA, Canada, Mexico) - in cooperation with SBS systems for business solutions GmbH.
👉 Learn more about our consortium: https://bit.ly/3T2C3aV
👉 Reach out to MacGuard Security Advisors: https://bit.ly/3SZUn4B
On November 16 and 17, the IBT symposium will take place in the Rhein Energie Stadium in Cologne. Venue Planner will also be there with its own booth. On the first day of the event Rainer Schüler will moderate the topic "Learning from disaters - or not?
That's what it's all about: Most of you will remember the pictures from Wembley or from the Astroworld Festival and the question hovering over everything: WHY? Why do such things still happen, even though we have seen them go wrong hundreds of times? Do we really have such a bad memory, even dementia? Or are we too arrogant and believe that it can't happen to us?
Learning from what has already happened (to others) is part of the tools of modern security planning. It is not a matter of transferring what others have experienced 1:1 to one's own reality. The reaction to the events at the Love Parade showed what happened: every underpass, no matter how small, was declared a dangerous hot spot, every event was viewed only from the perspective of "this shouldn't end here like it did in Duisburg" - of course, that's not the point either. What is at stake is the use of an opportunity. The chance to keep one's own thinking flexible and to deal with things that lie beyond one's own horizon of experience. No one will ever be able to guarantee that we won't run into really bad and / or very unpredictable situations and, of course, preventive engagement is no guarantee of prudent action - but it's certainly better than "never having thought about it". Many events - even the very rare and potentially "improbable" ones have aspects of actually quite normal safety planning in their course: from knowledge of responsibilities to missing / existing / unknown resources to factual procedures. So however bad the events are: we must use them, we must learn from them, we must not forget them
Before the conference starts, IBIT is making what we think is a pretty good offer: the IBIT User Days! There is no getting around the digitalization of crowd management - but which programs, which software solutions really help? We give you the opportunity to talk to the providers and developers free of charge. Ask your questions, find out if and what will help you.
One after the other, starting today, the solutions of PwC - the Crowd Management Platform, tomorrow the process documentation of Safesight and finally on Wednesday the digital event and security planning of Venue Planner will be presented. The event starts at 6 p.m., participation is free of charge and you can register here: anwendertage@ibit.eu.
