For most of its history, Ono Pharmaceutical focused on the domestic market in Japan, with landmark successes including the anticancer drug OPDIVO. In 2013, the company began expanding overseas, establishing subsidiaries in South Korea and Taiwan before turning its attention to Europe and the U.S.
A crucial element of Ono Pharmaceutical’s global expansion was to hire and develop outstanding talent—and make the most of people’s capabilities. The starting point was to integrate the disparate HR systems operating in each subsidiary. Unifying all human capital and governance systems seamlessly across borders was absolutely essential to driving global growth. The company decided it needed to deploy a platform that enabled the visualization of all its human capital information in a single system.
Identifying global talent in seconds.
Workday has proven invaluable as a talent management system that organizes the skills and experience of employees under a simple structure. In the past, when Ono Pharmaceutical’s HR department received a management request for candidates possessing certain qualities or experience, checking these requirements took countless rounds of back-and-forth. With Workday, the latest data is displayed at the required granularity, so all people need to do is set the requirements and click to bring up a list of candidates, enabling them to quickly find the talent they are looking for.
Changing how the business views HR.
Ono Pharmaceutical’s Workday is transitioning from an HR department system to a system for all employees. The company wants to make Workday a platform not only for driving talent development, career development, and employee engagement but also for employees to self-drive their careers and enhance their value.
HR departments are too often regarded as back office administrative departments. Ono Pharmaceutical is discovering that digital tools like Workday can be a powerful impetus for propelling the evolution of HR departments into strategic departments that contribute to business with an eye to the future.
Workday is not just an HR system, but rather a platform that enables essential management of the data of organizations and their people.
Business Solutions Department 2, Digital Technology Division.
Reducing IT maintenance time and effort.
At Ono Pharmaceutical, Workday consolidated various data into a single data core that could flexibly integrate with other systems. For example, organizational and employee information can be linked from Workday and integrated into other systems in real time. By making Workday a hub for employee data, IT can integrate it with internal workflows, chat tools, and various other systems, reducing user list maintenance tasks.
The consolidation of information in a single, up-to-date core also facilitates the operation of access management and other security tools that require strict management.