From manual planning to strategic talent management

Forvis Mazars is a major international player in audit and consultancy, supporting large groups and mid-caps across its core business lines: audit, advisory, tax, and accounting services. 

In France, nearly 5,000 employees are spread across 43 offices operating in a demanding sector where intelligent planning is essential. 

In a context of internal transformation and modernisation of its tools, Forvis Mazars France sought to rethink its engagement and planning management to improve resource allocation, make decision-making more reliable, and increase operational agility.

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Challenges faced before Napta

Forvis Mazars France was looking for a more modern, fluid tool that could be adopted by their various business lines. The new tool had to address multiple challenges:

• Suit all business lines and adapt to each of their specificities
• Integrate perfectly into Forvis Mazars’ IT ecosystem and ensure simple communication with other IS tools
• Produce reliable and easily manipulated data to improve decision-making
• Simplify and improve the overall quality of planning to increase execution speed and the relevance of responses to client needs
• Be scalable and adaptable to the organisation’s changing needs over time

Given these significant stakes, a tender was launched among several market players, and an internal team was formed to participate in the choice of the tool. This team consisted of the Executive Committee (COMEX), the IT Department, the planning team, and the finance department. Business employees were also consulted to gather all requirements.

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"We chose Napta because we greatly appreciated the quality of the collaboration. Their ability to adapt to the specific needs of each business line and to be proactive in offering solutions was a real differentiating factor." ‍

Clara Raymond, Audit Planning Transformation Manager

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What Napta delivered

Napta has enabled a deep transformation of resource planning and management. The platform has become a central point for information, coordination, and anticipation, addressing the various challenges faced by Forvis Mazars France:

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1. A Transformed User Experience

The adoption of Napta first changed the daily lives of the teams on an ergonomic and operational level:

• A modern, clear, and intuitive interface, accessible to all employees.
• Significantly improved execution speed: tasks that were previously time-consuming are now completed in just a few clicks.
• Intelligent management of conflicts and duplicates via simple drag-and-drop.
• Creation of pre-projects and temporary planning for tenders.

Example: when an employee leaves, all their planned assignments are transferred to another project in a single click. Previously, each slot had to be moved manually.

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2. Skills Management at the Heart of Planning

The skills dimension, central to the initial needs, is fully addressed:

• Keyword search engine to instantly identify the right profile
• Combination of declared levels and desires for practical application for more precise assignments
• Automatic generation of CVs from the platform to respond to tenders in record time
• "Social network" aspect: each mention in a project encourages employees to keep their profiles up to date, continuously improving data quality

Example: for a mission abroad, a search by language level identified a bilingual Spanish-speaking employee in seconds. This allowed for a rapid response to a client need while also enabling the employee to utilise a specific skill.

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3. Strengthened Management for Team Leaders

Napta gives planning teams a clear and shared vision for better decision-making:

• Extraction of utilisation and production rates to optimise team workload
• Dashboards filtered by team, office, or grade, simple to create and share
• A common real-time vision, with data always up to date
• Bulk validation of schedules, making processes much more fluid

Results Achieved

Since the deployment of Napta, the Forvis Mazars teams have observed tangible improvements across several dimensions.

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1. Operational Productivity Gains

The acceleration of daily actions has allowed the planning team to free up time from low-value-added tasks:

• Actions that were previously time-consuming are now performed in a few clicks
• The reduction in manual handling significantly decreases the risk of errors
• Planning requests and adjustments are processed in real-time, without wasting time

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2. Better Visibility of Skills and Assignments

The centralisation of profiles and availability has directly improved the quality of staffing:

• Better identification of available skills to assign the right people to the right projects
• Profiles maintained up to date continuously
• More reliable and better-documented staffing trade-offs

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3. Smoother Inter-team Collaboration and Better Adoption

Napta has profoundly changed how teams coordinate their planning:

• Staffing meetings are better prepared thanks to shared filtered views (by team, office, grade)
• A single source of truth, accessible to everyone in real-time
• Coordination between business lines (Audit, AOS, Advisory) is facilitated by unified processes
• Planning processes are standardising and unifying on a national scale

"Napta centralises, accelerates, and simplifies. It is a tool that allows us to plan more intelligently."‍

Olivier Guilbert, Financial Audit Partner

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These results reflect a profound evolution in planning, now thought of as a strategic lever rather than just a support function.