American Express GBT uses ReadyWorks to Reduce Onboarding Time for 1,250 employees by  75%

Challenge: American Express Global Business Travel (GBT), one of the world’s largest travel and event companies, needed to rapidly staff operations as COVID restrictions were lifted to meet the spike in customer demand. A small team was charged with scheduling the onboarding activities for 1,250 employees.

"Past projects have shown us that scheduling will take around 2 hours for each person. We quickly realized we couldn’t rely on manual processes if we were going to onboard so many employees in a short time."

AMEX GBT had implemented ReadyWorks to manage its migration to Windows 10 and for other asset lifecycle management program. Consequently, the use of ReadyWorks for this onboarding initiative was a natural extension of its functionality.

Solution: ReadyWorks provided a super dashboard from which the team could see the assets associated with each furloughed employee and determine the required onboarding activities. Following short training sessions, the team used the ReadyWorks self-service portal to schedule appointments to manage those activities, triggering automated confirmation mails. By providing a real-time view of calendars, ReadyWorks removed the need for daily synch up meetings and rescheduling when calendar conflicts were inevitably discovered.

AMEX GBT benefitted from:

• 75% reduction in scheduling time for onboarding 1,250 employees.
• A super dashboard view of assets held by furloughed employees to inform hardware workflow requirements for security compliance and streamline onboarding.
• Access at a click to reports to keep stakeholders informed of progress.

ReadyWorks managed this through:

• System Integration: ReadyWorks connected to existing AMEX GBT systems, tools and databases were implemented to aggregate employee, device, applications, and other data.
• Data Intelligence: With all information available about the IT assets furloughed employees currently had the team could determine the steps required for onboarding, e.g., if devices needed to be replaced, patched, or updated to maintain data security and regulatory compliance. Once activities were determined, the team could schedule them in real time. Business heads were kept informed of progress through links to real-time reports.
• Orchestration and Automation: Scheduling meetings in the ReadyWorks self-service portal automatically triggered confirmation mails to end users. By reducing the time of scheduling activities, onboarding activities were completed in time to meet the spike in travel and event planning demand.

“The time of scheduling each individual was slashed by 75% to just 30 minutes meaning our team of 8 were able to schedule the onboarding of 800 employees in two weeks.