Oceanco is one of the world’s leading custom superyacht builders, delivering highly specialised yachts that can take up to five years to complete. Each yacht operates like its own standalone business, requiring close coordination between engineering, production, procurement, planning, and project leadership teams.
As Oceanco expanded rapidly and signed new yacht projects, its existing spreadsheet-based resource planning processes began to break down. Workforce planning relied heavily on manual administration, disconnected spreadsheets, and knowledge stored in individual employees’ heads.
To support continued growth and improve workforce visibility, Oceanco implemented Retain International as a centralised resource planning platform.
The transformation enabled Oceanco to:
- Plan workforce demand years in advance
- Improve visibility into utilisation and resource gaps
- Match employees to projects based on skills and experience
- Handle reactive project ramp-ups more effectively
- Replace dozens of spreadsheets with a single source of truth
- Improve vacancy forecasting using live planning data
- Support larger and more complex yacht programmes with greater confidence
About Oceanco
Oceanco designs and builds custom superyachts for clients around the world. Unlike traditional manufacturing environments, each yacht programme is effectively a multi-year engineering project requiring specialist coordination across multiple business functions.
Depending on the size and stage of the build, projects can involve between 8 and more than 60 Oceanco people across engineering, production, procurement, planning, and project management teams. Alongside new-build yachts, Oceanco also manages complex refit projects where workforce demand can change rapidly with little notice.
This creates a unique operational challenge.
New-build yachts require workforce forecasting years in advance, while refits demand highly reactive scheduling and rapid workforce allocation. Balancing long-term planning with day-to-day operational flexibility became increasingly difficult as the company expanded.
During the same period Retain was implemented, Oceanco experienced an enormous organisational growth while simultaneously taking on more large yacht projects.
The challenge
Before Retain, workforce planning at Oceanco relied heavily on Excel spreadsheets, emails, and manual coordination between departments. Different teams worked from separate planning files, often with multiple versions circulating simultaneously.
Planning decisions were also heavily dependent on institutional knowledge held by individual employees.
Managers frequently relied on memory when assigning people to projects, which made it difficult to gain a complete view of workforce availability, skills, or future resource gaps. The same employees were repeatedly selected for projects simply because they were top-of-mind.
The complexity intensified during busy project phases.
Once yacht contracts were signed, workforce demand could ramp up rapidly, requiring engineering and production teams to scale quickly while avoiding unnecessary hiring or idle bench time. At the same time, refit projects introduced highly reactive planning requirements that were difficult to manage manually.
Without a centralised system, Oceanco struggled with:
- Limited visibility into workforce availability
- Reactive rather than proactive planning
- Multiple disconnected spreadsheet versions
- Manual vacancy forecasting
- Difficulty comparing planned versus actual utilisation
- Resource allocation based on memory rather than live data
- High administrative overhead during project changes
- The organisation needed a scalable planning platform capable of supporting both long-term forecasting and fast-moving operational demands.
Why Oceanco chose Retain
Oceanco evaluated several workforce planning solutions before selecting Retain International.
Two capabilities stood out immediately:
- Skills-based workforce planning
- Ease of use for operational teams
For Oceanco’s engineering leaders, Retain’s ability to match employees based not only on job title, but also on skills, experience, ambitions, and project suitability became a major differentiator.
Retain also enabled Oceanco to upload standardised capacity baselines linked to yacht size and complexity. This allowed teams to begin scenario planning and modelling workforce demand before projects formally started.
Another major factor was visibility.
By integrating workforce planning, utilisation data, vacancy forecasting, and Power BI reporting into a single platform, Retain became a central operational layer across the organisation.
As Anniek explained:
“The system tells me the truth.”
The transformation
Following implementation, Oceanco began shifting from reactive workforce management toward a more proactive planning model.
Teams could now:
- Forecast workforce demand years in advance
- Identify utilisation gaps before hiring additional employees
- Reallocate resources faster during project changes or absences
- Schedule employees further ahead
- Improve vacancy forecasting using live planning data
- Compare planned versus actual utilisation in real time
The organisation also integrated Retain with its HRM system, ensuring workforce data remained up to date and reducing dependency on manual administration.
One of the most important operational improvements came from visibility into actual utilisation.
Previously, busy projects often resulted in more people being added without understanding whether existing resources were fully utilised. Retain enabled managers to identify gaps between planned allocation and actual booked time before increasing headcount.
The platform also reduced reliance on individual knowledge by centralising workforce intelligence inside the system rather than inside employees’ heads.
The results
While Oceanco continues to evolve its reporting maturity and long-term forecasting capabilities, Retain has already become a very needed operational platform supporting the company’s growth strategy.
- The organisation now has:
- Multi-year workforce planning visibility
- Improved utilisation tracking
- Faster reforecasting capabilities
- Centralised vacancy forecasting
- Better workforce allocation decisions
- Improved skills-based resource matching
- Reduced dependency on spreadsheets and manual coordination
- Greater operational confidence managing complex yacht programmes
Most importantly, Oceanco was able to support two large yacht projects in its history during a period of rapid organisational growth.
The company moved from fragmented spreadsheet-based planning toward a scalable workforce management environment capable of supporting increasingly complex engineering operations.
According to Anniek:
“Retain allows us to plan years ahead while still reacting quickly when projects suddenly ramp up.”
Today, Oceanco uses Retain as a central workforce planning platform connecting capacity planning, utilisation visibility, vacancy forecasting, and long-term project scheduling into a single operational view giving the business the visibility needed to scale future yacht programmes with confidence.
