Yanmar Holdings is engaged in the effective use of energy in all fields of land, sea, and cities, centered on leading-edge technologies. Since 2016, with the aim of realizing a sustainable resource-recycling society, it has adopted the brand statement “A sustainable future: New richness through technology.”
In the fiscal year ended March 2024, sales reached 1,081.4 billion yen, of which 61.2% were overseas sales. The company has approximately 14,000 employees in Japan and approximately 7,000 overseas with production and sales bases worldwide, promoting optimal production and procurement tailored to local characteristics and needs.
The “HANASAKA” values, based on the founder’s spirit, are carried on in the human resources strategy “Yanmar 3 Circle.” This strategy is based on three Cs: Challenge, Character, and Contribution, and involves developing career systems that support employee challenges, mechanisms that respect diverse working styles and individuality, and compensation and welfare systems that reward performance.
In July 2024, Yanmar established the Employee Success Department with the aim of going beyond conventional employee management to support employees and lead them to success.
Shaping diverse teams for high performance.
The conventional HR system could only be used by HR personnel, which limited information sharing. In 2018, another company’s talent management system was introduced to focus on visualizing global human resources information, but data was aggregated from different HR systems, resulting in inconsistent information quality and insufficient utilization.
To solve this problem, Yanmar decided to introduce Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) as an open and transparent HR system. Workday matched the company’s requirements in terms of employee and company perspective, global expansion, and ease of operation.
From an employee’s perspective, it serves as a foundation for career autonomy, as employees can objectively understand their current skills and the skills required for their desired role, design their career plans, and receive recommendations for educational programs to fill skills gaps.
From a company perspective, it leads to stronger global organizational capabilities by enabling human resources allocation according to employee skills, understanding and building human resources portfolios based on midterm strategies, and selecting and developing management successors.
The company intends to leverage Workday to help each employee achieve self-realization, improve engagement, and further contribute to business growth and development.
With overseas sales exceeding 60%, Workday enabled Yanmar to understand and manage our global workforce and skills, fostering a unified ‘One Yanmar’ team.
Director, CHRO, Head of Employee Success Division
Personalised learning and strong succession plans.
During the preparation phase, Yanmar implemented a global grade introduction, developed a mechanism to understand employees and skills across the globe, and created skills maps through career development programs. On top of that, the company used Workday HCM to support the development of management successors and global talent allocation. The strength of Workday HCM is its ability to achieve these in a unified manner.
The deployment of Workday was done in four phases. In Phase 1 (Autumn 2024), a trial introduction was conducted for 3 to 4 subsidiaries in Europe, where personal information management is strict due to GDPR. This was because it was judged that if operations in Europe were successful, deployment to other regions such as North America and Southeast Asia could proceed smoothly. In Phase 2, Yanmar introduced Workday to 3 domestic companies and some overseas subsidiaries; and in Phase 3 (April 2025), it was completed for all consolidated domestic companies. Phase 4 is scheduled for global deployment.
Laying the foundation for future innovation.
During the implementation process, the HR team faced some challenges, such as developing job descriptions and clarifying reporting lines. However, having overcome them they have now moved closer to global standards.
In introducing Workday, HR also developed its strategy based on HANASAKA, the spirit of their founder. Yanmar Holdings aims to promote the growth of both the employees and the company by considering both employee and company perspectives. The year 2025 is the final year of its midterm management plan and the major goal of rebuilding its human resource management foundation has been achieved. Going forward, they plan to further accelerate its global expansion and promote HR modernization by introducing additional functions.
We want to develop our employees’ skills through investment in people and advance their capabilities as a workforce. In doing so, we aim to collaborate with management to increase productivity and create a system that allows us to shift towards more strategic work.
Director, CHRO, Head of Employee Success Division