Retain MatchingCore

Optimise complex resource plans at the click of a button

Every planning decision touches the wider plan. Move one person and three other projects feel it. Once you’re managing hundreds or thousands of people, alongside high-volume tasks and bookings, there’s no realistic way to check every possible allocation by hand.

Let MatchingCore do the heavy lifting on resource planning

Analyse your resource plan, compare optimisation strategies, and approve the changes that deliver the best results.

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Built for large-scale resource planning

As your organisation grows, resource planning becomes harder to manage manually. More people, projects, tasks, and competing priorities create hundreds of possible planning scenarios, making it tricky to know if you’ve chosen the strongest option.

Retain MatchingCore analyses your complete resource plan, compares those scenarios and gives your team the evidence to make faster, more confident planning decisions.

How Retain MatchingCore works

Create your resource plan

Build your resource plan in Retain using your people, projects, skills, availability, and business rules.

Pick your objective

Select the strategy that reflects your priorities, from improving workforce fit or revenue performance to preserving existing assignments.

Let it run

MatchingCore analyses your resource plan against your chosen objective, exploring allocation combinations while respecting your planning rules and constraints.

Review the options

See the recommended changes and their impact on your plan. Review and approve assignments individually or in bulk, keeping

Approve the winner

Choose the resource plan that best supports your business. Once approved, the changes are applied in Retain.

Why resource managers choose MatchingCore

Resource planning is full of trade-offs. Skills, availability, cost, utilisation, and 15 competing priorities, all pulling in different directions. MatchingCore makes them visible so you can choose between them deliberately.

MatchingCore gives your team more confidence in every planning decision by helping you:

Reduce planning effort: Analyse hundreds of possible allocation combinations at the click of a button, saving your team from manually working through assignments one by one.
Match the right people to the right work: Compare skills, availability, grades and business rules across your entire resource plan to identify stronger allocation options.
Improve utilisation: Allocate more work to the right people while reducing unassigned time.
Fewer clashes: Identify resource clashes before they affect project delivery, helping your team spend less time resolving issues later.

You stay in charge: Review every recommendation, compare the results and approve the final plan before any changes are applied.

Proven on complex resource planning challenges

A Big Four audit firm ran MatchingCore across its resource plan ahead of busy season, one of the most complex planning exercises in professional services. The improvements were measurable across thousands of assignments: Results Include:

11.1% more assigned hours

More client work allocated across the available workforce.

47.5% fewer generic hours.

More assignments matched to named resources, reducing unallocated work

47.4% fewer scheduling conflicts

Fewer resource clashes and smoother project delivery.

Higher utilisation across the audit practice

More productive use of available capacity.

More local assignments

More work matched to resources based on office location, helping reduce unnecessary business travel

Optimise for your business priorities

Different planning periods call for different priorities. You might want to improve workforce suitability, protect an established schedule, maximise revenue, or balance commercial performance with assignment quality.

MatchingCore lets you choose the optimisation profile that best reflects your goals, while continuing to respect the planning rules and constraints you’ve already set.

Additional optimisation objectives will be introduced as Retain MatchingCore continues to evolve.

Improve Fit — Maximise workforce suitability and assignment quality by considering skills, qualifications, availability, and other suitability criteria.

Improve Fit + Preserve Existing Assignments — Improve workforce fit and schedule quality while protecting confirmed assignments that have already been reviewed and agreed.

Improve Revenue — Improve commercial performance by optimising assignments around workforce suitability and revenue opportunities.

Improve Revenue + Preserve Existing Assignments — Improve revenue and workforce suitability while protecting confirmed assignments and limiting unnecessary disruption to established schedules.

See the impact of every optimisation

MatchingCore gives resource managers measurable evidence before changes are approved. Review the impact of an optimisation against the KPIs that matter to your organisation, then run different optimisation profiles to see how changing your priorities affects the plan.

You can compare:

Resource utilisation
Assigned hours
Unassigned work
Resource fit
Conflict hours
Overbooked hours
Delivery cost
Workload distribution

Frequently asked questions

Retain MatchingCore is an AI-powered resource planning solution that analyses your complete resource plan, compares hundreds of planning scenarios and recommends stronger allocation options based on the objectives you choose.

MatchingCore analyses the planning information already held in Retain, including skills, availability, demand, business rules, and other planning constraints. It evaluates hundreds of possible planning scenarios before presenting the strongest options for review.

No. MatchingCore supports resource managers by analysing planning scenarios at a scale that would be difficult to review manually. Every recommendation is reviewed and approved before changes are applied.

Yes. MatchingCore generates multiple planning options, allowing you to compare measurable outcomes such as utilisation, resource fit, assigned work, conflicts, and cost before selecting the preferred plan.

MatchingCore is available as an additional licensed product for Retain Cloud customers.

Build stronger resource plans with AI

Every resource plan is the sum of thousands of decisions. MatchingCore lets you see the versions you’d never have time to build yourself, measure what each one delivers and pick the one that best serves your people, projects and priorities.

Book your personalised demo today