Customer Stories
Improves Efficiencies and Gives Far Greater Insights
Who are Mazars?
With over 30 years’ experience, Mazars Ireland is a leading professional services firm, specialising in auditing, accounting, tax and advisory services in Ireland.
With over 400 employees in three offices across Ireland, Mazars focuses on delivering an exceptional service, creating value for its clients through excellent quality, deep knowledge of market sectors and keen business insights.
Part of a wider global group, Mazars has over 20,000 employees in 300 offices across 86 countries. The business prides itself on delivering the highest standards of quality, excellent client service and technical excellence.
At Mazars, we don’t have an anonymous pool of people, it’s important to us that we match the right person to the right project. We found Retain to be the solution that best met our requirements.
Aedin Morkan Audit & Assurance Director
Challenge
Mazars Ireland has experienced strong growth over recent years. However, as the business continued to grow, so did a problem at the heart of it – how Mazars planned its resources. Using a manual excel spreadsheet was becoming rather unwieldy. With more jobs, and new types of project coming in at an ever increasing rate, those responsible for planning projects were finding it increasingly unmanageable.
As this persisted, the issue of visibility, or lack of, was becoming an ever increasing problem. Mazars was experiencing both gaps in planning when available resources simply couldn’t be found, and conversely more work than they had the resources to fulfil projects, leading to resource planning challenges for planning managers within the organisation.
The IT team was also spending a lot of time manually manipulating project data into useable reports for the management team, including keeping on top of the management of internal processes such as regular project reviews with resources
Existing Solution
Manual spreadsheets
New Solution
Retain Wallchart & Web
Benefits
- Greater visibility of resources
- Better use of Management time
- Improved reporting and business processes
- Improved utilisation rates
- Storage of skills and qualifications to match resources to jobs
Results
Following the implementation, Mazars quickly noticed several immediate benefits. One of these was the ability to store large volumes of data on each resource and search for it, including resource location, qualifications and skills and industry experience. This enabled the planning team to allocate the best resource to a project, and in a much more efficient manner.
The level of configurability has also been a huge benefit to Mazars. Planners can assign different colours and shapes to resources or jobs to differentiate between bookings and time allocations (e.g. holiday, sickness and travel time). Planners, Managers and resources can now easily see at a glance what project a resource is booked to.
Mazars has found that using Retain has given the business a much great level of insight, far over and above what was possble to extract when using manual spreadsheets. Mazars also found that having significant amounts of data on the projects, with a high level of detail backing it up, and in a useable format, has been highly beneficial and has been used across the business.
Mazars has also utilised Retain to keep on top of internal processes. Historically, if a resource was booked to a job for over a certain amount of time, their manager was required to do fortnightly progess review on the job. Prior to using Retain, just finding out who required a review was incredibly time consuming and a convoluted process for the management and admin teams. Now, the information is readily available and allows the correct business processes to be followed and adhered to and ultimately making jobs more efficient.
Since using Retain, Management time has been freed-up no-end and, is being used more effectively. With information at their fingertips, Managers and Resources can all work smarter and not harder