In 1986, Dean Evans, the founder and president of Dean Evans & Associates, was approached by Colorado State University to create a software solution to manage meeting and event operations at the Lory Student Center. One of the largest and most respected student centers in the country, the Lory Center plays host to thousands of events each year including meetings, receptions, conferences, banquets, exhibits, concerts, theatrical performances and academic events. The result of the CSU project was The Event Management System (EMS), a software application designed to handle every detail of organizing meetings and events including: room scheduling, setup instructions, catering menus, equipment inventory, personnel scheduling, operational and managerial reporting, and billing.

Following the successful implementation of EMS at the Lory Student Center, word-of-mouth played a significant role in the growth of EMS, convincing Dean Evans & Associates to put more and more resources into the development and support of EMS as a commercial software product. In 1995, EMS software was rewritten to take advantage of the Microsoft Windows platform and EMS Lite was released late in the year. EMS Professional was released the following spring and an active marketing and sales effort yielded substantial growth for the company. The first version of Virtual EMS --EMS's Web-based companion-- was installed in 1998 and has undergone several major transformations since then. With customer feedback driving each new version, EMS software was well on its way to setting the standard by which other room scheduling and event management systems would be measured.

As existing customers began expanding their use of EMS to encompass multiple facilities across campus and across the country, it became apparent there was a need for an even larger, more scalable version of EMS. So in 1999, Dean Evans & Associates began work on EMS Enterprise, which was specifically designed to leverage the capabilities of Microsoft's SQL Server™ database engine. The first version of EMS Enterprise was installed in early 2000 to serve the campus-wide scheduling needs of a major university in the northeast.

EMS Hoteling was also born in 2000 when Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) approached DEA with the need to schedule workspace for their 70,000 employees, most of whom were traveling frequently and only needed office space on a temporary basis. A new module was developed for EMS Enterprise that added the ability to "pool" office spaces and manage reservations in much the same way that a hotel manages its reservations. A Web-based interface was created for submitting room requests, and a Kiosk program was written to allow employees to "Check-In" and find their office assignment for the day. The concept of office hoteling has enabled Accenture to reduce their real estate and overhead costs by reducing the number permanent workspaces in their more than 100 offices worldwide.

Today, thousands of facilities and more than 1,000,000 registered users rely on EMS to manage millions of meetings and events each year, rapidly making EMS software the industry standard. The EMS family of products including EMS Enterprise, EMS Professional, and EMS Lite is ideal for scheduling and managing a wide variety of facility types - for more information, check out 'Who Relies on EMS?'. No matter what kind of facility you have, we have an EMS product that can help you schedule it more efficiently and manage it more effectively.