Drei Österreich (Three) levels up their workforce planning capability

Drei Österreich: Driving digital transformation in workforce planning

Drei Österreich is the Austrian branch of global telecommunications provider Three. The company is a market leader in the Austrian telecom sector and provides the country’s densest and most powerful 4G network with a 98% population coverage. In addition to 4G, Drei is also expanding its 5G infrastructure, fiber connectivity, and mobile broadband services to support both private customers and enterprise clients. As a key player in the digital economy, Drei must manage large-scale workforce planning, financial forecasting, and complex reporting processes to ensure operational efficiency and competitiveness.

The limitations of legacy systems

Prior to the implementation of Pigment, Drei managed workforce planning using a patchwork of Excel spreadsheets, manual data entry, and outdated legacy systems. This caused a series of issues:

• Because this fragmented system had been in place for 20+ years, inputs were siloed across various roles, departments, and business units, making collaboration inefficient. Workarounds, duplicate data, and human errors were common.
• Drei runs three parallel planning cycles (FC1, FC2, and the budget) across multiple countries. Each cycle requires complex actuals vs. planned splits, frequent updates, and scenario modeling, tasks that were both time-consuming and error-prone in spreadsheets.
• Beyond simple budgeting, Drei needs to analyze internal vs. external personnel, employee benefits, headcount fluctuations, turnover, and potential legal penalties across several key dimensions such as employee, cost center, country, and project. Carrying out these advanced analytics in Excel was extremely difficult, often leading to slow decision-making.

As a result, the business urgently needed a scalable workforce planning solution that could handle complexity, improve accuracy, and reduce dependency on spreadsheets.

Watch our on-demand webinar HR and Workforce Planning with Pigment to see how leading companies are transforming their processes. In this session, you’ll discover:

• How to consolidate all workforce planning into a single platform
• Best practices for managing headcount, benefits, and compliance
• Ways to enhance collaboration between HR and Finance teams

Enter Pigment: Modern workforce planning software at scale

Following a three-month implementation with Pigment and partner Valantic, Drei’s new integrated workforce planning and analytics platform was ready to use.

Everything in one place: Collaboration and control

Today, workforce planning processes are consolidated into a single, employee-level platform with over 70+ active users. No longer are processes scattered across isolated Excel files and departmental silos. Instead, the new solution offers:

• Centralized monthly inputs per cost center and daily validations, enabling seamless collaboration between HR, FP&A, and Controlling teams.
• Built-in version control and audit trails, reducing the risk of errors, duplication, and rework while improving auditability.
• A scalable structure that supports scenario planning, forecasting, and real-time data analysis, helping managers make faster and more confident business decisions.

By adopting Pigment, Drei Österreich has modernized its workforce planning, financial forecasting, and performance management, empowering its teams with a more agile and collaborative way of working.

Want to see how other companies are transforming their planning with Pigment? Dive into the Keolis customer story, a global leader in public transportation. In this case study, you’ll discover how Keolis:

• Centralized its financial and operational processes into a single platform
• Improved collaboration between Finance, HR, and business teams
• Gained the visibility needed to steer performance in a rapidly evolving industry

Don’t miss this inspiring success story and see how Pigment helps Keolis modernize workforce planning and analytics at scale.

Agile forecasting

Rolling forecasts are now automated, supported by smart versioning, granular time splits and real-time actuals integration.

This means that all employees—whether internal or external—are included in a single model, enabling faster, more accurate reforecasting and scenario planning. Finance and Controlling teams can quickly adjust forecasts in response to market changes, regulatory updates, or workforce fluctuations, ensuring agility and resilience in planning.

Increased visibility

Pigment provides the Drei team with detailed employee and cost center-level reporting on information like FTEs, personal costs, bonus accruals, salary reviews, merit increases, and more.

One of the standout features for Drei has been Pigment’s organizational chart functionality. With the ability to model both agile team structures and traditional hierarchies, the business can finally plan HR organizations with the flexibility and agility it had always struggled to achieve in the past.

This new visibility has unlocked KPI tracking and advanced cost optimization analysis. For example, the team can now quantify the impact of employee fluctuation savings, merit-based salary adjustments, or legal penalties for non-compliance. Pigment even supports allocation logic for capitalized salaries, ensuring compliance and accurate reporting across all workforce-related costs.

Want to learn how to set up your own org chart in Pigment? Check out our step-by-step guide in the Pigment Community and discover how to model both agile team structures and traditional hierarchies with ease.

What’s next?

Following the success of the workforce planning rollout, the Drei team has plans for more use cases.

The first project on the roadmap is a carbon accounting dashboard, enabling the company to track and manage its ESG performance and sustainability metrics with the same precision it applies to financial planning.

Beyond that, there are a broad range of use cases that the FP&A team is interested in developing.

With Pigment, Drei has unlocked a scalable platform that grows with the business, empowering teams across departments to innovate, collaborate, and plan with confidence.

To see Pigment in action yourself, book a demo today.