How Grant Thornton Optimised Staffing with Napta | Success Story

Grant Thornton is a major international player in audit and advisory services, supporting businesses in meeting their reliability, performance and transformation challenges.

Spread across 24 offices in France, more than 3,000 employees operate in a demanding environment, where the quality of staffing relies as much on employee availability as it does on matching the right expertise with client expectations.

As part of modernising its internal processes, Grant Thornton was looking to transform its staffing management across all its business units: breaking down silos, strengthening real-time visibility, and leveraging AI to identify the right profiles for the right projects more quickly.

The challenges faced

Grant Thornton wanted to evolve its staffing process to address a central challenge: better deploying available expertise to meet client expectations.

For them, staffing is a key business process in their activity: it directly determines the company’s ability to mobilise the right expertise, at the right time, to meet client expectations and guarantee project performance.

In this context, it was vital to rely on a tool that was both comprehensive and flexible, offering a consolidated view of resources, skills and needs across the entire organisation, while being adaptable to the specific requirements of each service line: Audit & Insurance, Advisory, Business Solutions & Accounting, and Tax & Legal.

The stakes were multiple:

• Breaking down silos between teams to facilitate the flow of information and improve coordination between business units.
• Strengthening global visibility on resources to better anticipate needs, availability and staffing trade-offs.
• Planning based on skills to assign the right profiles to the right projects and meet client expectations more precisely.
• Improving the user experience with an ergonomic solution that is simple to learn and adapted to daily operational use.
• Using AI for a better skills / projects matching to accelerate profile identification and enrich decision-making.

Beyond a simple scheduling tool, Grant Thornton was therefore looking for a platform capable of supporting a broader transformation of its staffing practices: one that was more cross-functional, clearer and more skills-oriented.

“We had previously used Napta to track one of our flagship training programs. We were satisfied with the platform and, when we wanted to upgrade our staffing solution, Napta perfectly met our requirements.” — Alexandre Mikhail, Partner in Audit & Assurance and Director of the Technology & Innovation Hub, Grant Thornton France

The solution delivered by Napta

With Napta, Grant Thornton deployed a centralised staffing solution that brings together key information regarding resources, skills, availability and project requirements into a single environment.

The platform has become an essential pillar for streamlining daily staffing, improving the quality of decisions and boosting team adoption.

1. An ergonomic platform designed for adoption

The solution’s user-friendly ergonomics played an essential role in the success of the rollout. Napta allows teams to work within a clear, intuitive environment tailored to their daily habits. The ease of onboarding drives adoption, reduces operational friction and allows users to focus on what matters most: identifying the right profiles, managing priorities and responding effectively to client needs. This aspect was decisive in ensuring widespread use of the solution across Grant Thornton’s teams.

2. Real-time tracking for better staffing management

Napta provides teams with a consolidated, up-to-date view of staffing. Thanks to real-time tracking, teams can better visualise allocations, availability and upcoming needs. This shared visibility makes decision-making more reliable, helps anticipate capacity bottlenecks and smoothens coordination between different business units. As a result, staffing becomes clearer, more reactive and better aligned with the firm’s operational challenges.

“Financial tracking of assignments allows us to better manage the performance of each project, detect problems much earlier, and act more quickly to make the necessary corrections.” — Alexandre Mikhail, Partner in Audit & Assurance and Director of the Technology & Innovation Hub, Grant Thornton France

3. Skills management at the heart of resource allocation

For Grant Thornton, a major challenge was being able to plan resources based on the specific expertise required for each project. Napta centralises skills and makes them easier to leverage within the staffing process. Teams can quickly identify relevant profiles based on client needs, the required expertise and the unique features of each project. This approach shifts the focus from simple availability to a true alignment between skills, projects and client expectations.

“The goal with Napta was to break down silos in our staffing process, enabling offices to mobilize staff from other offices. Napta helps us identify off-site staff with the right skills and availability.” — Alexandre Mikhail, Partner in Audit & Assurance and Director of the Technology & Innovation Hub, Grant Thornton France

4. AI as a concrete lever for staffing

The integration of AI into Napta allows Grant Thornton to go further in identifying the best profiles. Through skills-to-project matching and profile suggestions, AI accelerates the search process, refines trade-offs and helps teams make better staffing decisions. The objective is not to replace human expertise, but to augment it: AI provides decision support, while the teams retain control over the final choices.

Results achieved

Since deploying Napta, Grant Thornton France has observed an improvement in its staffing process across three key dimensions: adoption, visibility and allocation relevance.

1. High adoption across all teams

The platform’s ergonomics, combined with the support from the Napta teams, made the rollout a success. The use of the solution by 100% of the teams reflects solid adoption, which is essential for ensuring data reliability, high-quality management and long-term staffing efficiency.

2. Enhanced visibility over resources and needs

Thanks to a real-time view of staffing, teams now have access to more reliable and widely shared information. This visibility allows for better anticipation of needs, easier tracking of allocations and smoother communication between different stakeholders. Staffing becomes less fragmented, more transparent and easier to manage at an organisation-wide scale.

3. More precise staffing driven by skills management

Centralising skills allows teams to better identify the profiles best suited to each project. Consequently, Grant Thornton can better align available expertise with client expectations, directly impacting the quality of service and the relevance of the deployed teams.

4. Practical AI integrated into the teams’ daily routines

AI provides tangible support to the staffing process through skills-to-project matching and profile recommendations. It accelerates certain steps, increases accuracy when identifying employees and enhances the quality of trade-offs, all without complicating the user experience.

In summary

With Napta, Grant Thornton has deeply transformed its staffing process. The platform centralises skills, strengthens real-time visibility, smoothens coordination between business units and integrates AI as a practical decision-support tool. Beyond resource scheduling, Napta supports Grant Thornton in a more strategic approach to staffing: one that is more collaborative, more skills-oriented and more closely aligned with its clients' expectations.