IATA: Landing global absence visibility

IATA operates on a global scale, working across 56 countries and acting as the trade association for the majority of the world’s airlines. As you can imagine, tracking employee absences of all types over so many different territories worldwide represents a huge administrative challenge, and requires a solution that is able to provide overviews, reporting, and accommodate the variety of regulations for each country.

Before deploying edays, IATA was using another online tool. However, the system was not specifically designed for absence management, and, furthermore, it wasn’t being used in a number of countries. The lack of a global outlook meant that it took considerable time for a central team to obtain and collate all of the necessary absence information to report to IATA management.

In August 2018 IATA embarked on a full scope Cornerstone OnDemand deployment journey. Cornerstone partnering with edays presented an opportunity to deploy its global absence management system.

In particular, the tool would be used to collate and track absence data globally, simplify leave booking processes for employees, and give full visibility to the managers, HR, and IATA management.

16 months from the implementation of edays’ global absence management solution, IATA is reaping the benefits.

For a global company, having a global tool has been paramount to enhancing, in particular, the visibility aspect of tracking and managing absences. Not only is it simple for employees to book planned and unplanned leave of absence, but there is also visibility for managers and teams, who can see when team members are in or out. This makes it easier to agree on the work schedules. Employees have been able to adapt quickly to using the system.

For the system admins, the solution has allowed managing different leave types on different country templates effectively taking into account specific local requirements for absence bookings and approvals. edays reporting functionality has enabled the set-up of necessary reports that are shared with payroll teams to process f.e. overtime requests in a timely manner. The IATA HR team is impressed with the edays support team, who have been on hand to respond to challenges, requests, and functionality concerns whenever needed, and supported the implementation every step of the way.

These benefits for both employees and admins are helping to optimize efficiency and management.

Looking ahead, IATA will strive to continue using the system with the same level of confidence and maintain continued cooperation with the edays support team to further develop its capabilities.