A trusted technology partner of governments, defense agencies, institutions, and enterprises, Leonardo is a prominent global business serving the aerospace, defense, and security industries. The group’s specialist business areas include electronics, helicopters, aircraft, cybersecurity, space, uncrewed systems, aerostructures, and automation. Its main industrial and commercial bases are in Italy, the UK, Poland, and the U.S., although it enjoys a multitude of successful international alliances and joint ventures around the world and has a commercial network spanning 150 different countries with 111 sites worldwide.
Leonardo’s revenue is now more than €15B with a workforce of just over 53,500. The group has a clear focus on digitalization and innovation to drive growth and competitiveness and to optimize engineering, manufacturing, and procurement processes. Consequently, the company fosters intensive upskilling and reskilling programs. This helps to ensure employees are well placed to take full advantage of advances in different technologies and proactively supports the sharing of knowledge both within and beyond the business.
As part of the company’s digital transformation, Leonardo has taken steps to change its internal processes and the way it does business by adopting a more uniform mindset that fully respects national laws and cultures. The introduction of Workday is a key element of the “One Company” program. It is acting as a digital enabler to drive the integration process and allow human resources to build a more agile and cohesive future using a single language, a single process, and a single platform.
Gaining the ability to flex and adapt to meet constantly evolving challenges.
Workforce development is a complex and challenging task for any company working in the aerospace and defense sector. International crises and a series of socio-political developments over recent years—such as the consolidation of European defense interests—have also impacted the recruitment and retention of staff. While the cyclical nature of the labor dynamic is not unusual, the business has to be well placed to find, attract, and secure the right skills and talents in order to harness technological advances and take the lead in product and service innovation. Taking a proactive approach to this challenge is helping to underpin Leonardo’s strategic objectives. It is using digitalization and AI in a cross-divisional and multi-domain environment to support organic growth. As well, Leonardo is forming new international alliances and strategic partnerships around the world to drive inorganic growth.
“In Italy, we have 34 sites with different cultures and regional differences,” says Francesco Rogo, CIO. “It’s a similar story when we look at the UK, Poland, Switzerland, Germany, and the U.S. But as everyone is now using the same ‘home’ for all of their employment data, career development, professional paths, performance reviews, and skills development, it is clear we are all part of the same family and working towards the same corporate goals. That, in turn, is reinforcing the principles of shared knowledge and the values of teamwork and is helping to forge a deep feeling of pride in one’s work.”
Having a positive digital experience with a single source of HR data is enabling us to bridge different cultures and national borders and is helping to instill a real sense of belonging and value for everyone in the business.
CIO
A common language for a “One Company” culture.
Workday has helped Leonardo to simplify communications and improve engagement with employees. It is also demonstrating the value of the “One Company” culture by replacing the disparate HR management systems across the global organization with consistency and a common language.
“Everyone is benefitting from this state-of-the-art system as it is so easy to use and everything is now at our fingertips,” says Rogo. “Previously, it was always difficult to compare and develop the skills, expertise, and capabilities of our workforce in different countries and areas of the business. We are now all speaking the same language, so career tracking and development is so much easier.
“But that’s not all,” Rogo continues. “Workday has a modern look and feel so it has been well received by staff and is an extremely practical tool. It has, for example, enabled us to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our recruitment processes. Such a progressive approach to recruitment is vital if we are to attract and retain the skills and expertise required for our future growth and success.”
Marrying traditional strengths with cutting-edge innovation.
Passion and pride are important values at Leonardo, so it is important for the company to marry traditional qualities such as trust and reliability with the spirit and excitement of innovation and discovery. This means matching new capabilities and efficiencies from the company’s digital transformation with the demands and opportunities presented by new-generation technologies in each of the group’s main business areas.
Workday is now providing Leonardo with a highly flexible and cohesive HR support system that adds real value to the wider digital transformation program. It is also enabling the group to take advantage of AI and machine learning to maximize efficiencies and automation in HR and enterprise management. This positive approach is providing more informed and intelligent predictive models and forward-looking metrics to help Leonardo plan smarter, report faster, and analyze better. This enables the company to lead by example and be more dynamic and responsive to market and labor demands than ever before.
The efficiency gains and level of staff engagement since we introduced Workday have been considerable, and we are already seeing the transformative impact and potential of the system’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
CIO