Sony Pictures: Implementing global absence tracking to compliment Workday

Sony Pictures Entertainment is an American entertainment company that produces and distributes motion pictures, TV programs, and recorded music. Sony Pictures were using paper and spreadsheets to up manage and track absence and after being recommended to edays by Sony Music, they decided to take a trial.

edays was rolled out quickly to ensure the go-live date was synchronized with Sony Pictures’ new holiday calendar year. Sony Pictures now use edays online platform which includes the online return to work forms, one click accurate data reporting, Outlook calendar integration, as well as holiday and sickness management.

Sony Pictures approached edays following a recommendation from Sony Music, another edays client. Sony Pictures was using a global HR solution (Workday) and a global Payroll solution (ADP), but neither system was able to deliver Sony’s global leave and absence management requirements.

As a result, the company had been using paper and spreadsheets to manage and track leave/absence and this was making the process manual, slow, and inaccurate. In addition, Sony was experiencing workforce planning issues due to poor visibility over planned and unplanned employee absences.

Sony also required seamless integration with its core HR system – Workday, with a data output also available for its global payroll system to complete the data flow.

edays was rolled out to Sony Pictures across 19 countries rapidly to hit a very tight go-live deadline that synchronized with their new holiday calendar year. Sony employees benefited immediately from fully automated leave management, with their approved absences automatically displaying in their MS Outlook calendars.

Sony’s edays system was set up with online return-to-work notifications and e-forms to help managers and HR proactively manage absence accordingly to the company policies. Team, department, and project views were created to ensure workforce management and planning teams were able to correctly scheduled projects based on important visible absence data.

The integration with Workday allowed all employee/manager reporting lines, and employee transitions and leavers to automatically update within edays – keeping both systems in complete harmonization.

edays meets the brief. Sony’s payroll team was able to replace their complex data collection and collation systems with one-click accurate absence data reporting through edays.

HR experienced a huge improvement in productivity following company absence policies and the online visibility of absence data meant that employees, teams, and project groups could plan projects efficiently.