How Asahi Kasei Uses Mando to Unlock Admin Productivity in Workday

Asahi Kasei is a global diversified company operating across materials, housing, healthcare, and electronics. With over 46,000 employees in more than 20 countries, operational efficiency is critical to keeping innovation and collaboration moving at scale. The company runs its core people and finance operations on Workday.

70%

Faster task completion

60%

Drop in AMS tickets

70%

Faster task completion

60%

Drop in AMS tickets

The Challenge

Asahi Kasei’s Workday team isn’t just reacting to issues — they’re proactively shaping how Workday supports the business. Christian, a senior Workday analyst, balances break-fix work with strategic roadmap execution: optimizing payroll, improving security audits, evaluating new features like Engagement Builder. But before Mando, even getting a simple answer came with significant overhead.

Across Christian’s 4-person Workday team, each admin spent 30 to 90 minutes per day digging through Workday Community, SharePoint folders, internal wikis, and Slack — trying to answer everything from “how do I tweak this calculated field” to “can we enable Skills Cloud without wrecking downstream reports?”

“I’d go in for one question and get stuck in rabbit holes. An hour and a half later, I’d have 10 tabs open and no idea what my original goal was.”

That loss of time added up fast — 10 to 15 hours per week, often on questions that Mando could now answer in seconds. It wasn’t just a workflow problem — it created real organizational drag. Admins spent more time context switching than configuring. Some ideas stalled because the team couldn’t validate them quickly enough.

Meanwhile, Asahi Kasei was paying $12,000/month to their AMS partner. For that, they received 10 active tickets — not resolutions, just tickets in-flight. The model created bottlenecks and forced teams to guess which tasks were worth “spending a ticket” on.

“We’re not even using all 10 tickets. I just figure things out with Mando. It’s faster.”

The team didn’t abandon AMS — they just stopped relying on it for momentum. All four admins now had access to Mando and increasingly used it as their default source of truth. The friction of discovery was gone. Answers that used to take days now surfaced in seconds. Confidence went up. Meeting prep got tighter. Ideas moved faster.

Instead of bouncing between Community posts and buried docs, the team now enters Mando, asks a question, and gets an answer rooted in Workday guides, real-world examples, and past customer patterns.

Search time dropped by more than 70%. The team now spends 10–15 minutes a day validating Workday questions. Often, less.

This impact extended beyond speed. Christian found that the ease of validating ideas inside Mando directly changed how he showed up at work. Instead of waiting for formal scoping or external validation, he could bring new solutions into team conversations with confidence.

“I bring way more to my manager now — because I’ve pressure-tested it in Mando first.”

The result? A team that’s not just keeping Workday running — but pushing it forward.

The Results

Since adopting Mando, Asahi Kasei’s Workday team has seen measurable gains in speed, confidence, and autonomy:

>70% reduction in time spent searching documentation
Fewer AMS tickets sent, freeing up budget and reducing coordination overhead
Team-wide adoption, with 4 seats in active use
Increased internal alignment, with ideas now pressure-tested before hitting leadership

Christian summarized it best:

“This is the floor. And I know it’s only going up from here.”

Mando gave Asahi Kasei not just an AI search bar — but a smarter, faster way to run Workday.