EasyJet jets off with Workday for HR cloud solution

Workday has 'depth of functionality, flexibility and engaging user experience', says easyJet

Budget airline easyJet has selected Workday's Human Capital Management (HCM) solution, in a bid to better manage its workforce.

The company, which flies more than 60 million passengers a year, has grown from a few hundred employees to several thousand in a short space of time. It therefore wanted a cloud-based HR and talent management application that could help new employees to integrate into the business, as well as manage important jobs across the business.

EasyJet will also tap into Workday's analytics features, which are built into the application. According to Workday, this will enable the airline to access a variety of reports through dashboards to help with decision-making.

The HCM application can also be accessed by easyJet employees and managers to update personal data and view reports, while there are self-service capabilities such as requesting time off also available to users.

"Our employees are really crucial to the airline's success as our friendly customer service is one of the reasons our passengers choose to fly with us and our staff differentiate us from our competition," said Alita Benson, group director at easyJet.

"With Workday, we found an HR cloud application with the depth of functionality, flexibility, and engaging user experience, which we believe will help us achieve our HR transformation goals and grow our industry leadership," she said.

Last year, easyJet CIO Trevor Didcock told Computing that the airline was investing a lot in mobile IT.

He said that the airline provided smartphones to pilots and BlackBerrys to management and admin staff. Pilots use their own personal iPads too, which prompted the airline to develop applications specifically for the Apple tablet. But although easyJet doesn't have any plans to provide tablets to all staff at the moment, Didcock said that tablets running on Windows 8 - such as Microsoft's Surface Pro - would be preferable to Apple's iPad because they're more compatible with the rest of the office ecosystem.