How SNCF Réseau optimized project planning and engineering workload forecasts

Managing France’s rail infrastructure requires SNCF Réseau to coordinate investment projects with engineering capacity. Fragmented tools and inconsistent planning practices made it harder for teams to share reliable plans, anticipate workload needs, and identify risks early

With Planview® ProjectAdvantage, SNCF Réseau built two complementary planning platforms connected through data flows. The first, COPLANN, dedicated to managing and planning investment projects, helped increase the share of projects planned in a collaborative environment from 30% to 80%. It also supports medium-term workload-capacity analyses.

The second platform, PLANNIPROD, supports engineering production plans and short-term management of named resources.

A subsidiary of SNCF, SNCF Réseau manages all of France’s rail infrastructure. With an annual investment budget of €5–7 billion, the company maintains the national rail network, invests in modernizing and developing the rail system, and oversees rail traffic to ensure it runs smoothly and reliably.

SNCF Réseau faced a dual challenge: transforming its project-planning practices while strengthening oversight of engineering production. For projects, the goal was to bring all stakeholders together around a shared, transparent planning framework. The organization wanted to harmonize practices that were still inconsistent by gradually adopting common standards and a collaborative planning system. It also sought to centralize data in a single tool connected to the company’s systems of record, to improve information reliability, eliminate duplicate data entry, and strengthen project oversight.

For production, SNCF Réseau needed to ensure that engineering resources were deployed in line with strategic priorities and business objectives. This meant anticipating needs more effectively, balancing workloads to avoid underutilization or overload, and responding more quickly to fluctuations in activity and unexpected events. The organization also needed to structure communication among stakeholders—from the client to production teams—to support smoother decision-making. Finally, identifying production risks and issues early was essential so they could be shared with project management teams and production managers, helping safeguard the delivery of investment projects.

Having spent several years modernizing its project-management tools, SNCF Réseau had relied on Planview® since 2005, through Sciforma’s PSNext solution, to strengthen project portfolio oversight and support its digital transformation. At the time, the planning environment consisted of a patchwork of tools whose interfaces limited exchange and data reliability.

To streamline its processes, the company first established shared, centralized data repositories within an “enterprise data hub” designed to collect, consolidate, and distribute information produced by different systems. This initiative was accompanied by a new project-management process intended to harmonize practices and improve data governance across the organization.

To bring this new architecture to life, SNCF Réseau selected Planview for its functional capabilities, user experience, robustness, and ability to integrate with a complex information system handling large volumes of data. Continuity with the legacy planning tool, PSNext, was also a consideration. The solution was deployed through two complementary platforms.

The results demonstrate a significant transformation of planning practices across the organization. The share of projects planned in COPLANN rose from 30% to 80%, reflecting the company’s commitment to using a single shared tool. Planning is now established by domain and use case, enabling a more reliable, granular view of engineering workloads. Developing reporting in Power BI and Databricks has strengthened oversight and information sharing.

The connection to PLANNIPROD has enabled production plans to be industrialized, notably by prepopulating them with data from COPLANN and establishing a business reference framework for engineering production plans. Entering data once now benefits the entire value chain and supports lasting user adoption. SNCF Réseau has observed no return to previous practices.

The organization plans to continue transforming its planning practices by activating a Project Master Schedule within COPLANN. Next steps also include developing portfolio management and planning for medium- and long-term opportunities. In parallel, SNCF Réseau plans to make data exchanges between COPLANN and PLANNIPROD more reliable, while supporting adoption with a simpler user experience and expanded functionality. It also intends to make greater use of its planning data by combining it with contracting and costing information.