As part of its amicable separation from Walmart, Asda is going through a type of digital transformation, with the large supermarket chain taking on a new human capital management platform to manage its 140,000 strong workforce.
Asda has decided to adopt the HCM platform Workday.
The third-largest supermarket in the UK chose the platform for its abilities related to internal people management and is now tasked with keeping track of its 6-figure workforce as well as looking after them.
The Workday integration is part of the supermarket’s ongoing digital transformation after it begins to unplug its systems from Walmart after its purchase by the Issa brothers back in 2020.
Within the Workday system, Asda is incorporating Workday Human Capital Management, Workday Absence Management, Workday Benefits, Workday Compensation, Workday Learning, Workday Prism Analytics, and finally Workday Recruiting. 
“We want to inspire and enable our colleagues,” said Hayley Tatum, chief people officer at Asda. “Workday will provide employees with the tools to learn and develop new skills relevant to their roles, while helping us to sharpen team and business performance.”
Hayley went on to add that: “Workday’s agile technology architecture means that we’ll be able to take on tomorrow’s challenges, helping to ensure that our colleagues have the support they need.”
Since the deal two years ago, which was worth approximately $8.8 billion, pandemic lockdowns have already boosted its ecommerce orders which has led to weekly delivery slots of 700,000 as it has plans to build this up to 1 million weekly delivery slots by next year.
Also, during the pandemic, Asda witnessed the growth of its trial partnership with the delivery service platform Uber Eats. It also began its trial of the delivery management platform Sorted to track its parcels to customers.
In addition to this, the age verification platform Yoti is also currently being trialed by a handful of Asda locations which allows customers to give their age at self-service checkouts without the need for an employee.
After its sale to the Issa brothers, the former CTO of rivals Morrisons, Anna Barsby, joined Asda as chief digital and tech officer and filled out its staff by hiring Carl Dawson as CIO to handle the digital transformation.
The new direction that Asda is moving towards presents an opportunity to eliminate legacy systems and begin a fresh renewal with cloud-based applications across its business. 
“The position we should be in in two years’ time is having no legacy technology,” said Carl. “We’ll be the only business of any scale that’s got absolutely no legacy technology anymore, because we’ll replace it all.”
With Workday, Asda’s people management will let the supermarket consolidate its employee management into a single platform. It also gives workers access to personalized training content for skill development from onboarding and goal settings to role changes.
The HCM platform will also let workers as well as their managers book and track time off and will use data imported from other systems – like point of sale – to monitor the effectiveness of specific processes in addition to highlighting areas of improvement.
Its technology stack also includes the core enterprise resource planning system Rise with SAP S/4 on Microsoft Azure. And it uses the SAP Business Technology platform and SAP Ariba for procurement.
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