American Airlines was founded by Charles Lindburgh and has been flying for the last 90 years.  Following the merger with USAirways that occurred in 2013, the employee population for AA exceeded 100k employees. 

With the merger of the two companies, a new human resources and payroll system was needed with the flying power to support the needs of the newly-merged company.  Also, it was the ideal time to modernize and improve on the employee experience by implementing state of the art human resources and payroll processing systems. 

As part of the merger process, all human resources systems were evaluated for fit in meeting the needs of a very large, diverse organization.  It was determined that: 

• The USAirways systems could not support the volume of employees and couldn’t provide the modern employee interface the merged company desired 
• The AA systems could support the volume, but the highly customized solution was not easily scalable and also needed a more modern employee interface for the merged company 

With a commitment to implementing best practices and cutting edge technology to support their employees, SAP Successfactors was chosen as the solution, with Employee Central as the employee portal for reviewing and updating personal information and other company-related information.  SAP’s Payroll engine was implemented to support the generation and processing of American Airline’s pay calculations. 

The implementation was a team effort between the two companies and various consulting firms, each playing their individual role to move the massive and complex project to a successful conclusion.  AspireHR, Inc was asked to provide resources to assist the internal business teams in writing and executing tens of thousands of test scripts against the new system to insure that each and every calculation, integration, and interface was processing correctly. 

Our team worked side-by-side with the business team in creating, reviewing, testing, regression testing, and supporting the roll-out of the new system. 

The implementation was a huge success, with minimal issues due to the thoroughness and attention to detail the AspireHR team provided in support of the AA teams.  While the full population is not completely transitioned to Employee Central, the final waves of employees will be transitioned into the new SAP Payroll system in the near future, completing the full and successful implementation of the needed human resources and payroll systems required to support American Airlines employee population. 

Challenges

• Complex merger of two major airlines and their HR systems, payroll rules and employee data 
• Need to modernize and improve the employee experience 
• Current HR applications that were not easily scalable to support the new much larger airline 

Solutions

• Implementation of SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central as the employee portal for personal information updates 
• SAP Payroll was implemented as the payroll engine to support the much larger new airline