AMEX GBT slashes onboarding scheduling time by 75%

Customer Overview

Client: American Express Global Business Travel

Industry: Travel

Employees: 18,000

Use Case: Asset Lifecycle Management

Business Outcomes

Scheduling time for onboarding 1,250 employees reduced by 75%.
Clear view of assets held by furloughed employees to inform hardware replacement or OS update requirements for security compliance.
Streamlined asset management to enable faster onboarding.
Real-time visibility into onboarding status.

CHALLENGE

Like so many other companies, GBT had to make some tough decisions when COVID hit – and that included furloughing or laying off some of its employees. Once travel restrictions lifted and business rebounded a small team of people were charged with scheduling the onboarding of 1,250 employees.

The logistics involved with scheduling involved individually contacting each employee to set appointments and emailing confirmation details of the appointments. They needed to schedule appointments with multiple engineers and using Outlook created complexities because they couldn’t gain a single view of all their calendars. But without real-time visibility into open timeslots, the members of the team had no way of knowing if the time they were booking was also being booked by their colleagues. They would coordinate activities at the end of the day, when they often found scheduling conflicts meaning they had to go back to the candidates and rebook.

OBJECTIVES

Schedule employees for onboarding activities in time to meet the spike in business travel and event planning demand.
Understand the asset requirements of furloughed employees to get them up and running quickly.
Maintain security compliance by ensuring all equipment is running the latest OS version.
Reduce the time and effort of reporting project status to business heads.

WHY READYWORKS

GBT used ReadyWorks to manage its migration to Windows 10 and is using it to manage other asset lifecycle management programs. By leveraging ReadyWorks’ capabilities, GBT is able to maintain complete visibility into assets and their associated properties throughout their lifecycle, ensuring equipment is accounted for and kept current with the latest security and feature updates. The team estimates that, in addition to reducing security risks, ReadyWorks has saved them 3000 labor hours on the Windows migration project and approximately 1,500 hours onboarding candidates to get them back to work. Using ReadyWorks for GBT’s return-to-work initiative is a natural extension of the platform’s functionality.

SOLUTION

Following two 30-minute training sessions with the team, GBT used the ReadyWorks self-service portal to book appointments for employee onboarding sessions. Confirmation emails were automatically triggered and sent to each end user as soon as an appointment was scheduled in the system. As a result, scheduling time was dramatically reduced.

The real-time insight that the portal allowed meant there was no need to conduct end of day progress meetings to coordinate activities. By removing the risk of scheduling conflicts the team didn’t have to go back to rebook candidates the next day, saving the team more time.

Reporting was made easier too – the team could send a single link to a project report in the portal allowing business heads to understand in real-time what progress was being made to get their teams up and running.

Aside from scheduling candidates for onboarding, ReadyWorks provided GBT with a clear view of the assets held by furloughed employees so GBT could decide if hardware or OS needed to be replaced or updated. The team can use ReadyWorks to manage the entire hardware refresh program – from acquisition through disposition. User requirements, scheduling and communication is all orchestrated and automated within Readyworks.

Self-Service Portal

The self-service portal allows the team to book appointments for employee onboarding sessions. Confirmation emails are automatically triggered and sent to each end user as soon as an appointment is scheduled in the system. As a result, scheduling time is dramatically reduced.

Scheduling Tab

By utilizing ReadyWorks all members of the team have access to a single, real-time view of the schedule. This eliminates the need to go back and rebook with applicants because of scheduling clashes.

Calendar Function

The calendar view gives each team member the ability to quickly view the tasks that have been assigned to them.