About the Organisation

This customer is a multinational organisation operating in the engineering and automation space, with operations spanning multiple countries and business units. Its programmes depend on close coordination between project managers, engineering teams, and regional resource leads.

As the business expanded across EMEA, resource planning came under increasing pressure. Coordinating specialist engineers and project managers across a growing number of regional teams created new demands on planning visibility and cross-team collaboration — demands the organisation's existing setup wasn't built to handle at scale.

The organisation had already been a long-standing Retain customer in an on-premise environment. But as operational requirements grew and internal IT governance standards evolved, the need for a more scalable, centrally approved solution became clear.

The Challenge

Retain was already embedded in how the organisation planned its projects — but the on-premise deployment no longer matched its evolving infrastructure and governance requirements. Having historically run independently of central IT processes, the platform needed to move onto a standardised, officially supported footing as the business scaled regionally.

Operationally, teams were also working around the limits of older workflows. Before newer Retain functionality was introduced, project and resource requests were frequently managed through:

• Emails
• Microsoft Teams messages
• Informal manual notes
• Ad hoc coordination between team leads

This created inconsistency and operational risk — particularly when key people were unavailable or information got buried in a thread or chat history.

There was also a longer-term issue: skills visibility. Resource allocation had often relied on team leads personally knowing which engineers were available and what they could do. As the organisation scaled across more regions, that kind of informal knowledge became much harder to maintain.

Why They Chose Retain Cloud

The move to Retain Cloud wasn't triggered by a single event — it came out of a broader evaluation covering:

• Infrastructure modernisation
• Alignment with central IT governance
• New platform capabilities
• Cost comparison between on-premise licensing and cloud deployment
• Scalability across regions

A major factor was the shift from a locally managed system to a fully approved enterprise platform within the organisation's IT function. Alongside that, newer Retain workflows offered clear operational upside — particularly the ability to capture resource requests directly in the platform instead of relying on disconnected emails and chat messages, making them visible and trackable across teams. That, in turn, improved resilience: information stayed accessible even when individual team members were on leave or had moved to different responsibilities.

The Transformation

Since moving to Retain Cloud, the organisation has continued to evolve its resource planning across EMEA. The biggest shift has been in standardisation and visibility. Project managers can now:

• Create and track resource requests centrally
• Reduce dependency on scattered, informal communication
• See resourcing status across teams, not just their own
• Maintain planning continuity through staff absences
• Coordinate regionally in a far more structured way
• Keep resource planning aligned with enterprise IT standards

The move also laid the groundwork for more advanced skills-based planning. While some of that capability is still being built out internally, improved skills matching and regional resource visibility are now explicit long-term goals. The organisation has also made use of Retain's reporting functionality and its BI tooling integrations to build more customised reporting suited to its own operational needs.

The Results

Having relied on Retain for many years, the organisation continues to use it as a core part of how it plans resourcing across its engineering and automation business. The move to Retain Cloud has helped the organisation:

• Standardise planning processes across EMEA
• Improve governance and IT alignment
• Cut down on fragmented, ad hoc communication during resourcing
• Improve visibility and continuity across project teams
• Build stronger operational consistency across regions
• Lay the foundation for future skills-based resource planning
• Modernise its resource planning infrastructure end-to-end

Visibility into resource utilisation was singled out as one of the biggest gains from the move — a marked step up from how things worked before. Reporting capability, including integration with the organisation's BI tools, was also called out as a key driver supporting better decision-making. While some teams are still adapting to the newer workflows post-migration, Retain is now a fully embedded part of how the organisation coordinates its engineering and automation resourcing across the region.