American Airlines recognized with SAP Innovation “Digital Trailblazer” Award

The Challenge

After the 2013 merger of American Airlines and U.S. Airways, the company knew a people first culture would be critical for their success and impact every business outcome.

The new American Airlines faced the challenge of migrating employee data across 60 different countries from multiple on-premise systems to one best-of-breed future-proof cloud platform that would deliver the unified, consistent, caring, and trusted experience for their 130,000-strong workforce.

The Journey

Project Spring was launched in 2016 to migrate the employee experience and associated systems around the globe to one best-in-class platform.

The numbers were staggering: 335,000 total employee records (current and retired); 130,000 current team members; 8,000-10,000 daily global users; 150+ unique interfaces to existing systems, and a daunting variety of on-premise HR solutions.

American Airlines chose SAP^® SuccessFactors^®, SAP Payroll and SAP Cloud Platform powered by SAP HANA^® Enterprise Cloud because of the mature global/local capabilities, the quarterly modernization and future-proof capabilities, and extensibility of the solution. Deloitte was selected as the system implementer and worked with American Airlines teams from ideation through to the global go-live.

The Outcomes

The project went live during 2016 and recently in March 2018 where the benefits and impact on the workforce were felt immediately. The best-in-class features, future-proof capabilities and foundation on which the company can innovate and integrate allow the new American Airlines to become both innovator and a global leader for empowering a world-class “people-first” culture.

• Personalized delivery of next-generation HR and payroll service
• Prompt resolution of employee inquiries
• Significant reduction in paycheck errors
• Enables General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance, and other data privacy improvements
• Provides workforce analytics, to measure and support corporate strategy
• 350% increase in job applications
• Average time to complete applications reduced—from 45 minutes to 10 minutes
• Mobile access for improved employee experience

Demonstrating caring in everything we do and building trust with team members connects to every business outcome that we need. SuccessFactors and the SAP Cloud Platform have been the cornerstones of bringing that to life for the New American.

- Mark Mitchell, Managing Director,
American Airlines, HR Shared Services

Congratulations, American Airlines. This project was driving by long-term, bold, people-centric thinking, and a vision for the future. We appreciate the opportunity to serve American and walk in lockstep with your team to bring it to life. The recognition is incredibly well-deserved.

- Bob Park, Principal,
Deloitte Consulting LLP

Click below to find out how American Airlines worked with Deloitte to deploy SAP^® solutions, creating a single, integrated HR system, resulting in an end-to-end transformation of HR processes, insights, and the user experience.