Andy Brice

Oryx Digital Ltd

PerfectTablePlan was created by Oryx Digital, a business owned and run by me (Andy Brice) and my wife (Claire Brice). The software grew out of the problems I experienced creating a table plan for our own wedding. I had offered to do the table plan for the reception. After all, how difficult could it be...? Despite the fact that we only had 60 guests and no ‘family politics' to worry about, it took me ages. Scraps of paper and Excel just weren't cutting it. There were always families split up, uneven sized tables and guests seated on their own. It is not too surprising when you consider the mathematics - there are 60 factorial ways to seat 60 guests in 60 seats. That is more than the number of atoms in the universe. I talked to married friends and acquaintances and they all agreed that doing the reception table plan was one of the most difficult parts of planning their wedding. If it is tough to seat 60 people who get along, what must it be like for 200+ guests when the parents have divorced and re-married? I spoke to charity organizers and professional event planners and found out that they also dreaded doing table plans. With my background in software development and optimisation I felt I was ideally placed to crack this problem. I released version 1 of PerfectTablePlan early in 2005. Since then I have been continually improving PerfectTablePlan with the help of feedback from an ever increasing number of enthusiastic users.