Kansai Airports Group includes nine operating companies and approximately 4,000 employees, 19% of whom are foreign nationals. The group aims to develop world-class talent and build a culture where employees feel joy and pride in their work. As part of this effort, the company introduced a vision to “Develop World-Class Airport Operations Professionals,” with five key pillars, including career autonomy and data-driven organizational management.
Ms. Rika Ito, Executive Officer and Deputy Chief Administrative Officer, shares, "Regarding career development, we have transitioned to a system that allows each individual employee to choose their own career path through our Job Posting Program (JPP), which currently runs alongside our traditional seniority-based system.
“To create an environment where employees can easily make their own career choices, the Human Resources Department is actively working to develop job-specific career path plans, update job descriptions, disclose position tenures, and refine the JPP process. As a result of these efforts, we achieved a 62% placement rate across 104 open JPP positions in fiscal year 2025.”
Adopting Workday HCM as a management platform driven by talent data.
The company's decision to implement Workday HCM was driven by the need to realize its talent management policy centered around the JPP (Job Posting Program). During the rollout of this new framework, the company faced the challenge that its legacy HR management system could not fully support its needs. Under the old system, talent data was siloed across various group companies, making it difficult to optimize talent allocation from a group-wide perspective. Furthermore, as the workforce became increasingly diverse and globalized, there was a growing demand for consistent, multilingual HR operations.
Given this background, the company adopted Workday HCM as its foundational platform to centralize talent data and enable data-driven organizational management. Jun Tazuhara, HRMS Group Leader in the Group Human Resources Department, explains: “The deciding factor in choosing Workday HCM was its ability to leverage talent data to drive the evolution of our business management itself. We particularly highly evaluated three key aspects: centralized data management, real-time visualization and analytics capabilities, and an intuitive user interface (UI).”
Precisely because their work is centered on human interaction, I want our employees to leverage data and AI to enhance their skills and improve operational efficiency, and then dedicate the time saved to creating new value. To that end, we aim to create an environment where everyone can work with pride and a strong sense of belonging.
Executive Officer, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer
Achieving rapid value with a phased deployment.
The implementation of Workday HCM began in July 2023. Under Phase 1, the company fast-tracked the launch of the Core HCM, Goals & Performance, Compensation Management, and Payroll Interface modules, officially going live in April 2024. Currently, in Phase 2,the company is progressing with the rollout of Succession Planning, Career Development, Learning, and Onboarding modules, targeting completion by the end of fiscal year 2026. Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, Kansai Airports plan to consider implementing Recruiting and Planning modules.
Ms. Ito explains the strategy behind this approach: “Our goal in choosing a phased implementation was to quickly master the essential functions first, while keeping initial costs to a minimum. Our plan is to progressively deploy the additional capabilities the organization needs as our employees get used to the system.”
Enabling data-driven organizational management.
The implementation of Workday HCM eliminated the need to exchange Excel files for performance evaluations, reducing the total working hours of the HR department by approximately 20%. HR staff have shared positive feedback, noting that “company-wide employee and organizational data are now integrated, allowing for timely collection and analysis,” and “employee goals and evaluations have been centralized into a database." Managers have also praised the change, stating that "it has enabled data-driven organizational management."
Furthermore, the company uses the HR dashboard capabilities to drive data-informed decision-making. Ms. Ito explains: “HR managers compile employee attributes, performance, positions, and headcount into dashboards for executives and management. This supports the creation of an optimal organization while effectively managing full-time equivalents (FTE).”
While the utilization of Workday HCM has only just begun—with the enrichment of talent data and wider internal adoption still in the early stages—the company feels a strong sense of progress now that its future direction is clearly defined.
Mr. Tazuhara concludes: “Management can now grasp our talent situation in real time, enabling faster decision-making. The HR department has successfully broken away from a workload dominated by data aggregation and shifted toward more strategic initiatives. For employees, careers and evaluations have become far more transparent, fostering autonomous growth. I feel the most significant change is that the roadmap toward our ideal vision has finally become clear.”
This project was not just about implementing a new system—it provided a valuable opportunity to reexamine our core HR operations. We feel there is immense value in the fact that we were able to align the entire company and discuss what talent management should look like while standardizing and redesigning our workflows.
HRMS Group Leader, Group Human Resources Department
Transitioning to AI-enabled management.
Moving forward, the company plans to further consolidate group-wide talent data and use it for strategic decision-making, including the visualization of organizational structure and talent allocation, succession planning, and talent reviews.
Mr. Tazuhara concludes: “We believe that centralizing the management of talent data will serve as a crucial foundation for advancing sophisticated analytics and data utilization. Ultimately, our goal is to leverage AI to unlock the full potential of each individual, driving performance improvements across the entire organization. By doing so, we aim to build an organization that can fully capitalize on its human capital even in a rapidly changing environment, and continue to grow as a world-class airport operations company.”