In the dynamic day-to-day activity of some of the world’s busiest airports – whether Miami or Mumbai, Santiago or Stockholm, or many other hubs – the 55,000-plus employees of Menzies Aviation are engaged to ensure that you complete your journey safely, efficiently, and on time. As a global leader in aviation services “working above and below the wing,” Menzies provides a myriad of services, including ground services, fueling, air cargo handling, and executive services, together with comfortable lounges at more than 295 airports in 65 countries.
Menzies Aviation delivers time-critical logistics that annually result in 1.3 million aircraft turns, 3.2 million aircraft refueled, and 2 million tons of cargo handled. Already in its third consecutive year of double-digit growth since the pandemic, Menzies accelerates its market momentum through a mix of strategic partnerships, contract wins, and acquisitions. And demand for modern, efficient passenger and cargo services is ever increasing. In fact, the global airport services market is forecast to grow from US$196.96 billion in 2024 to $570.12 billion in 2032.
Ask the employees of Menzies Aviation what they like about their jobs, and they’ll likely tell you that it’s the variety and pace of work in an environment where every day is different and every action matters.
Sarah Mackinlay, senior vice president of People Projects & Integrations at Menzies Aviation, says that outstanding teamwork is at the heart of Menzies’ success: “There isn’t one person who can do their job alone. You need a team of people to prepare, load, and push back an aircraft. Everybody working positively together drives that excellence. It’s that united vision of wanting to safely provide the best possible service.”
This team spirit inspires employees to work toward their full potential to achieve exceptional service. To empower its employees to deliver safe and trusted aviation services that are integral to its mission, Menzies is on a transformative journey to harness the power of technology for greater productivity and business agility. Menzies now provides employees in 53 countries with an improved employee experience – a result of its global HR transformation to adopt the cloud-based capabilities of SAP SuccessFactors HCM.
About Menzies Aviation – World’s Largest Aviation Services Company
Menzies’ proud heritage started in 1833 when John Menzies, spotting a gap in the market, opened his first bookstore in Edinburgh to become the only wholesale bookseller in Scotland. The advent of rail travel soon created a market for railway bookstalls, which led to the expansion of Menzies’ business across the region. When air travel took off in the twentieth century, Menzies’ organization adapted quickly to provide services to this emerging industry. In 1987, it acquired companies specialized in overnight and heavy freight. To position itself in the twenty-first century, the company strategically pivoted to providing cargo handling and passenger services, expanding rapidly through acquisitions. In 2022, it merged with National Aviation Services (NAS), under the ownership of Agility, to create the world’s largest aviation services company. It is now the No.1 aviation services provider by number of countries, airports, and aircraft turns.
Putting “People, Passion, and Pride” at the Center of Business
With a proud heritage that dates to 1833, Menzies has always been a business that is about people, Mackinlay underscores. The company aligns its business and people strategy on three pillars: people, passion, and pride. “From a people strategy point of view, we’re very much focused on three key drivers: making Menzies a great place for our people to work; being passionate about growing our employees and growing our own leaders; and taking pride in getting the basics right,” she says. “That third pillar is where my focus is at its strongest. By doing that, it makes [Menzies] a great place to work, and it gives people the opportunity to lead, learn, and grow.”
By choosing SAP SuccessFactors HCM, Menzies now has a unified platform to help it attain data-driven insights for business agility and provide a modern employee experience with opportunities for learning and career development. “My job is an enabler for so many other things within our organization,” Mackinlay says. “Providing a solution that supports our frontline employee or manager in the business to do their job more efficiently, smoothly, and easily – those things are what really excite me.”
Unlocking Business Insights from Global Visibility of Data
Menzies had previously relied on a mix of people processes and platforms, and struggled to make sense of its people data, which was siloed in disparate systems in various regions. “The simple question of ‘How many employees do you have?’ we couldn’t answer that at the click of a button,” says Mackinlay, noting the critical nature of seasonal travel fluctuations that impact the workforce. “That could take us several days to a week to be able to go out to all our regions and check and validate those numbers, because data was held across multiple systems and spreadsheets.”
Already experienced working with the SAP SuccessFactors Learning solution since 2015, along with SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals for graded management across the business, Menzies Aviation had selected SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central as its core HR system, but the implementation was very gradual in the early years and by the end of 2022 the solution had been rolled out to just 11 countries. In early 2023, Menzies began its transformative journey to leverage the broad benefits of cloud HR. Working with EPI-USE as its implementation partner, it accelerated the global rollout by prioritizing a defined baseline consistency model over more detailed, country-specific customizations. It also benefited from pre-delivered localization capabilities, such as language support, local best practices, and automated legal and regulatory updates. In one year, 52 countries were up and running on SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, integrated with the SAP SuccessFactors Learning, SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals, and other core business systems, making it the source of truth for employee data where live.
October saw the latest location join this journey when Hong Kong went live with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP SuccessFactors Learning. Utilizing this momentum, Menzies is now expanding its use of the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll solution, which is already available to its workforce in the UK and will soon include Portugal and Hong Kong.
“We’re a small team, but each person contributed an exceptional effort, both in time and skill, to bring the organization together around this transformation – that includes stakeholder buy-in, mapping and cleansing the data, all the quality checks, and communicating clearly and openly with HR teams around the business to ensure adoption and change management,” says Mackinlay, who is optimistic about what the next phases of Menzies’ cloud HR journey will bring. “There were some long days, indeed, but as a team we can be proud of what we’ve accomplished so far – and the benefits to the business are already becoming apparent. This is the real foundation for what we can go on to achieve next and having the support of the local HR teams continues to be critical to the success of the rollout.”
Today, Menzies no longer needs to estimate how many employees it has at any given time. Having a single source of data means that it can pull up this information at the push of a button for the present as well as the historical past for comparison. “We can start to see trends, so we can start to understand what our future models would look like as well,” says Mackinlay, who values the improved reporting capabilities that provide greater visibility into the business – which, for example, helps the teams to understand the type of work people are doing and how their time and effort contribute to the business. “Being able to have business insight and business data to make decisions has been really important on our continued journey with SAP SuccessFactors and supporting our global strategy.”
Menzies is reaping the benefits of moving towards one global solution, which include consistent and standardized HR processes across its multiple countries and territories of operation, role-based authorizations for data access, worldwide regulatory compliance with localization, simplified maintenance for a single solution, and ease of integration with other HR processes and functions. As Mackinlay summarizes, “For us, this journey is about having a single source of truth with global consistency, data insight, and visibility yet maintaining local data ownership. Data security and integrity are at the very core.”
One Stop for Employee Experience
For Menzies Aviation, the journey gains momentum as more employees engage with the platform, opening the way to transform how work is done. Currently, Menzies is focusing its effort to elevate the employee experience by introducing self-service capabilities for all employees, giving them access to their own data and streamlining HR service delivery with efficient, real-time processes for workflows and approvals.
More than two-thirds of Menzies employees perform their work away from a desk, so communication with these employees for routine employment matters can be challenging. The new self-service capability is the next part of Menzies’ journey enabled by its SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central base platform. Menzies is partnering with other core business systems to create a new one-stop entry point for all employment-related information, including upcoming shifts, holidays, and tools to support employees in their day-to-day roles.
A key benefit for HR teams is that it frees them to focus on more value-added work. As Menzies continues to grow and hire new employees, it plans to look for digital solutions to accelerate the recruiting and onboarding processes. Menzies is also excited to explore how AI-enabled technologies can further support the HR team – including adopting Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, and using generative AI.
“We’re a people business,” Mackinlay says. “We want our HR teams to be with our people. It’s a journey that we’re on – and we’ve been on since 2015 – to enable our HR teams to have the tools to be more employee facing and available to support our employees as they grow and develop their potential towards an exciting career at Menzies Aviation.”
Find out more about SAP SuccessFactors HCM.
