Cultural transformation overcomes service complexities and fragmented structure

Parques Reunidos has become one of the world’s leading leisure park operators. It now has 60 leisure parks across Europe, North America and Australia that collectively host 20 million visitors a year. Continuing expansion has seen the group complete many strategic acquisitions over the past two decades. Today, its sales revenue is in excess of €800m and continues to increase. The group’s portfolio now spans 11 countries and includes theme parks, zoos, marine parks, water parks and indoor entertainment centres as well as many other attractions.

With a wide range of brands spread across the world and a workforce that can rise from 3,000 to 18,000 during the year, the company’s management team has key objectives to help it build on its commercial success and secure the highest level of visitor satisfaction:

• Instill a common global culture
• Deliver the best possible experience for employees, not just customers
• Make the best possible use of data
• Streamline finance processes

Once the challenges posed by the pandemic had passed, Parques Reunidos took positive action to fulfil its objectives. The company introduced Workday to support its HR and finance teams as well as to improve employee engagement across all of its global operations. The new tools have been introduced in phases and are helping the company to transform its operational efficiencies, optimise transactional processes and drive improved profitability. The tools provide invaluable insight to inform the local decision-making process and enable individual parks to retain and empower staff and deliver a first-class customer experience.

Driving continuous improvement and collaboration across the group 

The company wanted to develop a common culture across 60 different parks around the world but found it challenging without the right infrastructure and support.

“We needed a tool to help everyone feel part of the same organisation – a tool that will evolve and develop in tandem with our business and that will promote greater collaboration across the group as well as our drive for continuous improvement. Workday enables us to digitise our processes and the employee experience to improve efficiencies, staff engagement and management autonomy. The system has proved to be truly transformational and, because it is so easy to use, it has been very well received by staff in all areas of the business.

“Workday has really changed the way we work. For example, I can now pick up my mobile phone and authorise or approve transactions in Australia and the U.S. at any time of day and know how many employees I have in a park in Spain at any time. That level of insight and efficiency simply wasn’t possible before Workday.”

Given the nature of their roles in the different leisure parks, many employees don’t have their own company email account so it was very difficult for Parques Reunidos to undertake meaningful staff engagement projects and satisfaction surveys. There are also nine different languages to contend with as well as the need to embrace generational diversity within the workforce. Workday has helped Parques Reunidos to overcome this problem, leading to a significant increase in survey response rates. It has also provided a clear demonstration of the company’s commitment to active listening and its determination to address issues promptly.

Fully integrated financial processes transform efficiencies

The rapid growth of Parques Reunidos over the past two decades has been founded on a series of strategic acquisitions. Such rapid expansion has created a very dynamic business, although there was still much to do in terms of structural integration. This was particularly evident in the group’s financial processes. Here, there were more than 13 different financial systems and a complex and disparate ecosystem of transactional tasks around each leisure park. This was extremely cumbersome and dependent on time-consuming manual interfaces and data uploads.

“Given our inorganic growth, it was imperative for us to move to a single financial system and create a more integrated, informed and effective approach,” says Juan Ignacio Alonso Ibarra, Finance Transformation Corporate Director, Parques Reunidos. “We needed a tool that would provide us with the right disciplines and processes to shift the focus from traditional transactional operations to more value-added activities and to help us optimise our profitability. And we wanted to achieve that by adopting the principles of best practice without needing to customise the system to reflect our existing methods.

“Workday has enabled us to do just that and is playing a key role in our financial transformation,” Ibarra continues. “And, because the different Workday products are fully integrated, it has also enabled us to build on the successful use of the system in the HR area.” 

With Workday supporting the group’s finance processes, Parques Reunidos now has more agile, secure and reliable processes in place to support the group’s continued expansion. This has provided transaction capability even at barcode level and has greatly simplified the integration process for any new acquisition.

Capitalising on the data gold mine

The effective use of data is critical to Parques Reunidos given the group’s global presence and the operational variations and contrasting demands and aspirations of large leisure parks and small leisure venues. Whether it’s a seasonal recruitment drive during peak periods, financial planning, KPI monitoring, delivering effective coaching or maintaining staff motivation levels, the ability to access and capitalise on quality data is vital.

“Workday has not only given us confidence in the reliability and accuracy of data, but has also improved access to such information. It has given us much greater control as well as the benefits of a much higher level of automation,” says Ibarra. “It is also enabling us to analyse data from many different angles and perspectives in real time. This provides us with invaluable insight and helps to ensure individual parks and the group as a whole can flex and respond positively to market developments and opportunities. Having such agility and foresight at all times and in all areas really does give us a competitive advantage.”

By standardising processes and stabilising data, Workday has helped to establish a “common language” across the group. It has also helped to digitise the employee experience from the moment an individual applies for a position within the group. This, in turn, has further increased the scope for process automation and efficiency gains and is playing a key role in the group’s cultural and operational transformation.