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10 years of pde
Exactly 10 years ago, pde Austria was founded as PORR Design & Engineering GmbH. A lot has happened since then. Today pde Integrale Planung has 2 national companies in Austria and Germany and employs over 300 staff at 8 locations.
Reason enough to celebrate the day of its founding with an anniversary cake, which was cut by the Managing Directors Markus Strobl and Klaus Gruber.
Take a look at the video (available only in German) to see the evolution over the past 10 years along with statements by employees who have accompanied pde since the very beginning:
The “wild” roots
The history of pde actually began back in 2007, with Gebäudetechnik International at its core, led by Gernot Wagner, who is now Managing Director of PORR Bau GmbH and a member of the PORR Group Executive Board.
At that time, Gebäudetechnik realised that it had to closely coordinate its services with design and planning experts in order to succeed on the construction site. This meant that, over the years, various specialist planners were integrated and even entire departments were taken over, like Architecture from the former PORR Solutions. In 2011, a joint decision was made on how to name the mix of designers and building engineers, initially as a department. The name PORR Design & Engineering came about and was also chosen as the name of the limited company when it was founded as a separate subsidiary on 7 June 2012.
Growth and structure
At that time, not only the specialist planning departments for Architecture and Structural Engineering (Vienna and Premstätten) were part of pde, but also Construction Preparation, Building Information Modelling and Sustainability. When the company was founded, pde already had around 70 employees. In the following year, the TGA Planning department was added and, in November 2013, a separate limited liability company was founded in Berlin. The number of employees grew to 116. In the next few years, the Dresden and Düsseldorf locations were added in Germany, while in Vienna the Calculation department of PORR Bau GmbH was integrated into pde.
By 2016, pde already had over 300 people in Austria and Germany combined, covering the entire range of PORR’s design and planning services. Building Information Modelling was already standard in the planning projects. Fire protection proved to be an increasingly important topic, especially for acquisition, and was expanded in Berlin.
At this point, the expansion of the LEAN department began with the first large LEAN project for BMW in Munich Freimann. BIM and LEAN required cross-trade and cross-team cooperation, and so the organisational structure was also adapted in 2017 with the departments of General Planning, Specialist Planning (in Austria and Germany respectively) and the Design Studio in Berlin.
Identity and focus
From 2018 onwards, project acquisition outside the PORR Group was activated with a standalone pde website and the first internal pde events for employees kicked off with the pde Infoday. With a clear positioning towards market development and employer branding, the company was renamed pde Integrale Planung GmbH in April 2021 and was launched as an independent brand based on PORR, of which pde remains a wholly owned subsidiary. As exciting as the first 10 years of pde have been, the next decade will bring many new developments and challenges. The managing directors of the two national companies Klaus Gruber, Torsten Haubold and Markus Strobl definitely have big plans for the future in terms of integral planning with BIM and LEAN.