Improve the reliability of project and RUN portfolio management through a shared single source of truth

The Company

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DIM is an iconic French company in the textile industry, specializing in underwear and everyday essentials. For over 70 years, the brand has been designing products that combine comfort, style, quality, and affordability, with a clear mission: to support real bodies in their movements and help build self-confidence every day. In the ever-evolving retail apparel and fashion sector, the company must balance product innovation, operational performance, cost control, and coordination across multiple countries.

In this context, DIM’s IT department selected Tabsters to streamline the management of its project portfolios and RUN activities, with the goal of reducing costs, improving data reliability, and expanding internationally.

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Challenges & Objectives

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Background

Before Tabsters was implemented, tracking projects, RUN activities, and resources relied primarily on Excel files. While this approach made it possible to track essential information, it made consolidation more complex, particularly in the context of cost-cutting measures and gradual international expansion.

The IT department wanted to standardize this monitoring process in order to gain a more reliable, centralized, and actionable view of projects, workloads, availability, and capacity. The initial scope of the project was limited to the IT department, with a rollout involving several countries: France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

The challenge, therefore, was to move from a fragmented, manual monitoring process to a common management framework capable of centralizing information, ensuring data reliability, and supporting management decisions at the project and RUN portfolio levels.

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Key Issues

The main issues centered on:

• the industrialization of resource monitoring;
• the centralization of project data, RUNs, workloads, and availability;
• improving the reliability of management information;
• consolidating data in a single location;
• the establishment of a shared source of truth;
• tracking team hours and contributions;
• visibility into available capacity;
• monitoring of costs related to service providers, particularly in terms of man-days;
• internal cost allocation;
• the implementation of automatic notifications to facilitate the tracking and updating of information.

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Selection process

DIM launched a pilot program in France before planning a phased rollout to other countries in successive waves. This approach made it possible to successfully complete the first phase of the project, validate key use cases with the relevant teams, and then prepare for the international expansion of the initiative.

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How to Use Tabsters

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Use cases

As part of this collaboration, DIM uses Tabsters to address several key needs:

• Project portfolio management;
• Management of RUN activities;
• Overview of projects, workloads, and resources;
• Monitoring the capacity plan;
• Time tracking and contribution tracking;
• Centralization of data in a single location;
• Cost tracking and internal billing;
• Verification of vendor invoices for man-days;
• Implementation of automatic notifications;
• Preparation of consolidated financial reports;
• Gradual rollout of the program internationally.

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User profiles

The solution is used by more than 80 users, including: the IT Director, project managers, contributors, team leaders, and those involved in tracking resources, workloads, and costs.

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The benefits

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The implementation of Tabsters at DIM offers several key benefits:

• Greater visibility into project portfolios and RUN activities;
• Centralization of data into a single source of truth;
• Improving the reliability of resource tracking and time tracking;
• Clearer management of team workloads and availability;
• Consolidated overview of the capacity plan;
• Time savings in data consolidation and report generation;
• Better control over costs, internal billing, and vendor invoices;
• Streamlining the tracking process that was previously done in Excel spreadsheets;
• Reduced risk of data loss due to employee turnover;
• Gradual rollout of a common international governance framework.