How Yole Optimized Their Human-Centric Planning with Planisware Orchestra

Yole Group doesn’t look like an organization that needs a project and portfolio management (PPM) solution. There are no factory floors, no machines, but Analysts, research, and reports. However, even with this human-centric model, it was still difficult to manage operations and ultimately, evoked a need for a digital transformation.

Pars Mukish, Director of Operations at Yole Group, is responsible for planning company’s report calendar and ensuring analysts are assigned to the right projects at the right time. But in Yole’s case, balancing the priorities of standardized off-the-shelf reports and last-minute, high-revenue consulting requests was becoming unmanageable. Mukish shares how the semiconductor-focused market intelligence firm reshaped its resource management practices using Planisware Orchestra, with the goal to not optimize machine planning, but people.

Where Expertise is the Product

It’s not every day where you hear about an organization where expertise is what makes the company so successful. 

The firm specializes in market research and forecasting for high-tech industries such as semiconductors and photonics. Their end products, detailed market reports and Excel-based forecasts, are sold to clients ranging from electronic component manufacturers to autonomous vehicle companies. But unlike tech companies with scalable code or industrial tools, Yole’s value comes from its people.

“Yole is a niche company. Not many companies in the world do what we do,” 

The information in the reports comes mostly from Analysts. Analysts start by collecting basic information online, but the most valuable insights come from interviews with industry professionals, where they ask about trends, key technologies, and what’s likely to succeed in the future.

“Once they’ve gathered that data, the analysts analyze it and write a story, something that explains the technological context, the market size, the supply chain, and the outlook. Most of our clients want to know how big a specific market could be, whether it’s worth millions or even billions of dollars. That’s the core of our business.”

People Planning Is A Different Game

With machines, forecasting is straightforward: Factors like performance, uptime, and yield can be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy, but managing people presents a different challenge. As we all know, humans are different and each analyst at Yole works differently, faces unexpected delays, and often underestimates how long tasks would take.

As a result, Yole routinely experienced delays early in the year without the ability to assess their long-term impact. The true consequences only became apparent at the end of the year, by which time the team was scrambling to catch up. This cycle repeated itself year after year to the point where the leadership team recognized the need to rethink how they managed analyst resources. Yole saw the need to optimize how analysts were allocated and supported.

“This recurring cycle of overcommitting and under-delivering forced us to change our mindset,” explained Pars Mukish. “For years, we focused on growing revenue. Now, the goal is improving profitability. And to do that, we had to manage our analysts like production assets, just as a manufacturer manages machines.”

That realization led Yole to implement Planisware Orchestra.

The Role of Planisware Orchestra

Implementing a PPM tool in a human-centered business isn’t as easy as it sounds. Planisware Consultant Fannie Le Fel explains more. 

“You’re not dealing with product specs, but also you’re managing unpredictable workloads and shifting priorities,” said Le Fel. 

Therefore, the early focus was on creating visibility: understanding who was doing what, which projects were active, how analysts were shared across domains like semiconductors and automotive, and where bottlenecks routinely emerged.

Until that point, Yole had relied heavily on Excel, which made it nearly impossible to assess how a new high-revenue consulting request, often arriving with just days’ notice, would affect in-progress work or derail the delivery of pre-sold, off-the-shelf reports.

“Off-the-shelf reports are easy to plan. They’re predictable,” Mukish explained. “But custom consulting projects? They show up unexpectedly and throw off everything. And we had no system to simulate the ripple effects or understand the cost of saying yes.”

With Orchestra, Yole can now model those trade-offs. The platform supports live capacity views and scenario planning, giving the team a realistic way to anticipate consequences and, when needed, make the hard choice to say no. This allowed them to qualify them, protecting core commitments, and communicating those decisions transparently to internal teams and clients.

Building Habits, Shifting Culture

But technology alone doesn’t change behavior. As Mukish noted, “The tool is a shell. The value comes from how people use it.”

At Yole, senior management supported the implementation of Planisware from the very beginning. They understood the pain points and recognized the need for change. However, for the wider team, the introduction of a project management tool required a significant mindset shift. Many team members equated project management with little more than meetings and Gantt charts.

This misconception was addressed head-on, even during training sessions. While many employees believed they were already familiar with project management, the reality was different: time budgets weren’t being followed, timesheet entries were often delayed, and structured reporting was not the norm.

There was also some resistance rooted in the perception that structured processes were too rigid or “square.” It became essential to communicate that the goal is to achieve visibility and control to enable better decision-making. Implementing Planisware involved instilling new habits, such as filling out timesheets regularly and adhering to defined workflows. 

“Most of our team thought they were already doing project management, but when you ask if they’re tracking time budgets or updating plans regularly, most hands go down.” – Pars Mukish

Training became essential. Mukish and a colleague took on the role of internal trainers, introducing habits like weekly timesheet updates and structured planning cycles. These changes, though small, laid the foundation for long-term adoption.

“Our leadership supported the tool from day one,” he added. “But getting the rest of the team on board meant changing mindsets.”

Forecasting for the Future With AI in Sight

As AI continues to evolve, Yole looks forward in taking advantage of AI agents in the future. In a perfect world, Yole’s team envisions Planisware Orchestra integrated with AI to serve as an interactive assistant.

“I’d love to interact with Orchestra the way I do with ChatGPT,” said Mukish. “Ask it questions. Test ideas. Get instant feedback.”

Today, resource planning at Yole involves navigating a mix of known and uncertain project data. Some projects are 90% confirmed, others just 20% or 50%. Mukish often finds himself juggling those levels of uncertainty in Excel, manually adjusting scenarios and even consulting ChatGPT for rough guidance: What happens if I assign Analyst A to overlapping projects? Will we miss deadlines? The answers aren’t perfect, but they offer fast directional thinking.

“That kind of AI-powered forecasting would be a game-changer,” Mukish said. “The structure and rigor of Planisware, combined with the responsiveness of AI. That would be magic.”

Planisware Orchestra comes equipped with built-in AI capabilities, but the true impact of these features depends on the quality of your data and the maturity of your processes. Want to know if Orchestra is the right fit for your organization?  Get in touch with us here.