Asahi Kasei
Asahi Kasei
Asahi Kasei
Asahi Kasei
How Asahi Kasei Troubleshoots Twice as Fast
How Asahi Kasei Troubleshoots Twice as Fast
What we did
Reduction in search time
Drop in AMS tickets
Admins actively using Mando
Asahi Kasei
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.
Industry
Chemical
head count
49,295
team size
4
At a glance
The Challenge
Asahi Kasei isn't a company where the Workday team just keeps the lights on. With 46,000 employees across 20+ countries, the 4-person Workday team operates more like an internal product org — optimizing payroll, tightening security audits, evaluating new modules like Engagement Builder and Skills Cloud. Christian, a senior Workday analyst, spends as much time on the strategic roadmap as he does on break-fix. That's the job. The problem was that even simple questions came with enormous overhead.
Across all four admins, each person was losing 30 to 90 minutes per day to research. Not complex analysis. Not deep architectural thinking. Just finding answers. The workflow looked the same every time: start in Workday Community, hit a dead end, pivot to SharePoint, check the internal wiki, skim a Slack thread from three months ago, open fifteen browser tabs, and eventually piece together something that might be correct.
"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 added up to 10 to 15 hours per week of lost productivity across the team — not on hard problems, but on the friction of finding information that already existed somewhere. Admins were spending more time context-switching than configuring. Ideas that could have moved the platform forward stalled because the team couldn't validate them quickly enough to bring them into conversations with leadership.
And then there was the AMS contract. Asahi Kasei was paying $12,000 per month to their Application Management Services partner. For that, they got 10 active tickets. Not 10 resolutions — 10 tickets in flight at any given time. The model created an artificial bottleneck. Every issue required a judgment call: is this worth spending a ticket on? Can I figure it out myself in less time than it would take to wait for the AMS team to context-switch into my problem?
The answer, increasingly, was yes.
What Changed
All four admins got access to Mando. The adoption wasn't mandated — it was organic. Christian started using it for quick validation on configuration questions. Within days, the rest of the team followed. The reason was simple: Mando answered questions faster than any alternative. Not sometimes. Consistently.
Instead of bouncing between Community threads, buried documentation, and half-remembered Slack conversations, the team started every question in Mando. Answers came back grounded in Workday admin guides, real-world implementation patterns, and validated customer examples. The research loop that used to consume 30 to 90 minutes collapsed to a few minutes.
"We're not even using all 10 tickets. I just figure things out with Mando. It's faster."
Search time dropped by more than 70%. The team went from spending 30–90 minutes per day on research to 10–15 minutes. Often less. AMS ticket volume fell by 60% — not because the team was ignoring problems, but because they were solving them before a ticket was ever needed.
But the real shift wasn't just speed. It was confidence. Christian found that the ease of validating ideas inside Mando fundamentally changed how he showed up in conversations with his manager and with leadership. Instead of floating tentative suggestions that needed weeks of scoping, he showed up with pressure-tested proposals backed by documentation he'd already verified.
"I bring way more to my manager now because I've pressure-tested it in Mando first."
The Results
Since adopting Mando, Asahi Kasei's Workday team has moved from reactive administration to strategic operations:
70%+ reduction in time spent searching documentation — from 30–90 minutes per day to 10–15 minutes
60% drop in AMS tickets, freeing up budget and eliminating the bottleneck of rationed support
All 4 admins actively using Mando as their default starting point for Workday questions
Faster internal alignment — ideas are now validated and pressure-tested before they reach leadership
The team didn't abandon their AMS partner. They just stopped depending on it for momentum. Mando handles the first line of inquiry. AMS handles the exceptions. That's a healthier model — and a cheaper one.
"This is the floor. And I know it's only going up from here."
At a glance
The Challenge
Asahi Kasei isn't a company where the Workday team just keeps the lights on. With 46,000 employees across 20+ countries, the 4-person Workday team operates more like an internal product org — optimizing payroll, tightening security audits, evaluating new modules like Engagement Builder and Skills Cloud. Christian, a senior Workday analyst, spends as much time on the strategic roadmap as he does on break-fix. That's the job. The problem was that even simple questions came with enormous overhead.
Across all four admins, each person was losing 30 to 90 minutes per day to research. Not complex analysis. Not deep architectural thinking. Just finding answers. The workflow looked the same every time: start in Workday Community, hit a dead end, pivot to SharePoint, check the internal wiki, skim a Slack thread from three months ago, open fifteen browser tabs, and eventually piece together something that might be correct.
"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 added up to 10 to 15 hours per week of lost productivity across the team — not on hard problems, but on the friction of finding information that already existed somewhere. Admins were spending more time context-switching than configuring. Ideas that could have moved the platform forward stalled because the team couldn't validate them quickly enough to bring them into conversations with leadership.
And then there was the AMS contract. Asahi Kasei was paying $12,000 per month to their Application Management Services partner. For that, they got 10 active tickets. Not 10 resolutions — 10 tickets in flight at any given time. The model created an artificial bottleneck. Every issue required a judgment call: is this worth spending a ticket on? Can I figure it out myself in less time than it would take to wait for the AMS team to context-switch into my problem?
The answer, increasingly, was yes.
What Changed
All four admins got access to Mando. The adoption wasn't mandated — it was organic. Christian started using it for quick validation on configuration questions. Within days, the rest of the team followed. The reason was simple: Mando answered questions faster than any alternative. Not sometimes. Consistently.
Instead of bouncing between Community threads, buried documentation, and half-remembered Slack conversations, the team started every question in Mando. Answers came back grounded in Workday admin guides, real-world implementation patterns, and validated customer examples. The research loop that used to consume 30 to 90 minutes collapsed to a few minutes.
"We're not even using all 10 tickets. I just figure things out with Mando. It's faster."
Search time dropped by more than 70%. The team went from spending 30–90 minutes per day on research to 10–15 minutes. Often less. AMS ticket volume fell by 60% — not because the team was ignoring problems, but because they were solving them before a ticket was ever needed.
But the real shift wasn't just speed. It was confidence. Christian found that the ease of validating ideas inside Mando fundamentally changed how he showed up in conversations with his manager and with leadership. Instead of floating tentative suggestions that needed weeks of scoping, he showed up with pressure-tested proposals backed by documentation he'd already verified.
"I bring way more to my manager now because I've pressure-tested it in Mando first."
The Results
Since adopting Mando, Asahi Kasei's Workday team has moved from reactive administration to strategic operations:
70%+ reduction in time spent searching documentation — from 30–90 minutes per day to 10–15 minutes
60% drop in AMS tickets, freeing up budget and eliminating the bottleneck of rationed support
All 4 admins actively using Mando as their default starting point for Workday questions
Faster internal alignment — ideas are now validated and pressure-tested before they reach leadership
The team didn't abandon their AMS partner. They just stopped depending on it for momentum. Mando handles the first line of inquiry. AMS handles the exceptions. That's a healthier model — and a cheaper one.
"This is the floor. And I know it's only going up from here."
At a glance
The Challenge
Asahi Kasei isn't a company where the Workday team just keeps the lights on. With 46,000 employees across 20+ countries, the 4-person Workday team operates more like an internal product org — optimizing payroll, tightening security audits, evaluating new modules like Engagement Builder and Skills Cloud. Christian, a senior Workday analyst, spends as much time on the strategic roadmap as he does on break-fix. That's the job. The problem was that even simple questions came with enormous overhead.
Across all four admins, each person was losing 30 to 90 minutes per day to research. Not complex analysis. Not deep architectural thinking. Just finding answers. The workflow looked the same every time: start in Workday Community, hit a dead end, pivot to SharePoint, check the internal wiki, skim a Slack thread from three months ago, open fifteen browser tabs, and eventually piece together something that might be correct.
"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 added up to 10 to 15 hours per week of lost productivity across the team — not on hard problems, but on the friction of finding information that already existed somewhere. Admins were spending more time context-switching than configuring. Ideas that could have moved the platform forward stalled because the team couldn't validate them quickly enough to bring them into conversations with leadership.
And then there was the AMS contract. Asahi Kasei was paying $12,000 per month to their Application Management Services partner. For that, they got 10 active tickets. Not 10 resolutions — 10 tickets in flight at any given time. The model created an artificial bottleneck. Every issue required a judgment call: is this worth spending a ticket on? Can I figure it out myself in less time than it would take to wait for the AMS team to context-switch into my problem?
The answer, increasingly, was yes.
What Changed
All four admins got access to Mando. The adoption wasn't mandated — it was organic. Christian started using it for quick validation on configuration questions. Within days, the rest of the team followed. The reason was simple: Mando answered questions faster than any alternative. Not sometimes. Consistently.
Instead of bouncing between Community threads, buried documentation, and half-remembered Slack conversations, the team started every question in Mando. Answers came back grounded in Workday admin guides, real-world implementation patterns, and validated customer examples. The research loop that used to consume 30 to 90 minutes collapsed to a few minutes.
"We're not even using all 10 tickets. I just figure things out with Mando. It's faster."
Search time dropped by more than 70%. The team went from spending 30–90 minutes per day on research to 10–15 minutes. Often less. AMS ticket volume fell by 60% — not because the team was ignoring problems, but because they were solving them before a ticket was ever needed.
But the real shift wasn't just speed. It was confidence. Christian found that the ease of validating ideas inside Mando fundamentally changed how he showed up in conversations with his manager and with leadership. Instead of floating tentative suggestions that needed weeks of scoping, he showed up with pressure-tested proposals backed by documentation he'd already verified.
"I bring way more to my manager now because I've pressure-tested it in Mando first."
The Results
Since adopting Mando, Asahi Kasei's Workday team has moved from reactive administration to strategic operations:
70%+ reduction in time spent searching documentation — from 30–90 minutes per day to 10–15 minutes
60% drop in AMS tickets, freeing up budget and eliminating the bottleneck of rationed support
All 4 admins actively using Mando as their default starting point for Workday questions
Faster internal alignment — ideas are now validated and pressure-tested before they reach leadership
The team didn't abandon their AMS partner. They just stopped depending on it for momentum. Mando handles the first line of inquiry. AMS handles the exceptions. That's a healthier model — and a cheaper one.
"This is the floor. And I know it's only going up from here."
Use case
01
From Rabbit Holes to Real Answers
Every Workday admin knows the feeling. A straightforward question — how to adjust a calculated field, whether a security group change will cascade, what the interaction is between two business process steps — turns into an afternoon. Not because the question is hard. Because the information is scattered across a dozen surfaces that were never designed to work together.
Christian's team ran the same loop on every question. Start with Workday Community — the obvious first stop, and often the worst. Community search is notoriously unreliable: you get threads from 2019, answers that reference deprecated functionality, links to documentation that's been reorganized twice since the post was written. If Community doesn't yield a clear answer in ten minutes, you pivot. SharePoint folders next. Then the internal wiki. Then Slack — searching for that one thread where someone mentioned this exact issue four months ago.
An hour and a half later, you have fifteen browser tabs open, three partially relevant answers, and no certainty about any of them. So you test in sandbox. Another thirty minutes. And if the sandbox results are ambiguous, you escalate — file an AMS ticket and wait.
This wasn't an occasional frustration. It was the daily reality for all four admins. Every day, each person lost 30 to 90 minutes to this cycle. Across the team, that was 10 to 15 hours per week spent not on configuration, not on strategy, not on moving the platform forward — on searching.
"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."
The cost of this wasn't just time. It was cognitive. Every context switch — from Community to SharePoint to Slack to sandbox — carried a mental tax. Admins weren't just losing minutes; they were losing focus. The deep work of actually configuring and improving Workday kept getting interrupted by the shallow work of finding information about how to configure and improve Workday.
And the organizational cost was real too. When it takes an hour to validate a simple question, you stop asking questions. You stick with what you know. You don't propose the optimization you were thinking about because you can't afford the research time to confirm it's viable. Innovation doesn't get killed by complexity — it gets killed by friction.
Our Solution
Mando replaced the entire research loop with a single starting point. Instead of Community → SharePoint → wiki → Slack → sandbox, the team now starts in Mando. Asks the question. Gets an answer grounded in Workday admin guides, validated implementation patterns, and real-world customer examples.
The answer isn't always complete — sometimes it's a pointer, sometimes it's a narrowed-down starting point. But even in the worst case, it eliminates the first hour of searching. In the best case, it resolves the question in under two minutes. Either way, the fifteen-tab rabbit hole is gone.
Daily research time dropped from 30–90 minutes per admin to 10–15 minutes. Often less. The team collectively reclaimed over 10 hours per week — time that went directly back into the configuration and strategic work they were hired to do.
The Results
Search time dropped by more than 70%. All four admins independently adopted Mando as their default starting point — not because they were told to, but because the alternative was obviously worse. The rabbit holes didn't disappear entirely. But they went from being the daily norm to a rare exception, triggered only when a question genuinely had no documented answer. For everything else, there was Mando.
Use case
01
From Rabbit Holes to Real Answers
Every Workday admin knows the feeling. A straightforward question — how to adjust a calculated field, whether a security group change will cascade, what the interaction is between two business process steps — turns into an afternoon. Not because the question is hard. Because the information is scattered across a dozen surfaces that were never designed to work together.
Christian's team ran the same loop on every question. Start with Workday Community — the obvious first stop, and often the worst. Community search is notoriously unreliable: you get threads from 2019, answers that reference deprecated functionality, links to documentation that's been reorganized twice since the post was written. If Community doesn't yield a clear answer in ten minutes, you pivot. SharePoint folders next. Then the internal wiki. Then Slack — searching for that one thread where someone mentioned this exact issue four months ago.
An hour and a half later, you have fifteen browser tabs open, three partially relevant answers, and no certainty about any of them. So you test in sandbox. Another thirty minutes. And if the sandbox results are ambiguous, you escalate — file an AMS ticket and wait.
This wasn't an occasional frustration. It was the daily reality for all four admins. Every day, each person lost 30 to 90 minutes to this cycle. Across the team, that was 10 to 15 hours per week spent not on configuration, not on strategy, not on moving the platform forward — on searching.
"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."
The cost of this wasn't just time. It was cognitive. Every context switch — from Community to SharePoint to Slack to sandbox — carried a mental tax. Admins weren't just losing minutes; they were losing focus. The deep work of actually configuring and improving Workday kept getting interrupted by the shallow work of finding information about how to configure and improve Workday.
And the organizational cost was real too. When it takes an hour to validate a simple question, you stop asking questions. You stick with what you know. You don't propose the optimization you were thinking about because you can't afford the research time to confirm it's viable. Innovation doesn't get killed by complexity — it gets killed by friction.
Our Solution
Mando replaced the entire research loop with a single starting point. Instead of Community → SharePoint → wiki → Slack → sandbox, the team now starts in Mando. Asks the question. Gets an answer grounded in Workday admin guides, validated implementation patterns, and real-world customer examples.
The answer isn't always complete — sometimes it's a pointer, sometimes it's a narrowed-down starting point. But even in the worst case, it eliminates the first hour of searching. In the best case, it resolves the question in under two minutes. Either way, the fifteen-tab rabbit hole is gone.
Daily research time dropped from 30–90 minutes per admin to 10–15 minutes. Often less. The team collectively reclaimed over 10 hours per week — time that went directly back into the configuration and strategic work they were hired to do.
The Results
Search time dropped by more than 70%. All four admins independently adopted Mando as their default starting point — not because they were told to, but because the alternative was obviously worse. The rabbit holes didn't disappear entirely. But they went from being the daily norm to a rare exception, triggered only when a question genuinely had no documented answer. For everything else, there was Mando.
Use case
01
From Rabbit Holes to Real Answers
Every Workday admin knows the feeling. A straightforward question — how to adjust a calculated field, whether a security group change will cascade, what the interaction is between two business process steps — turns into an afternoon. Not because the question is hard. Because the information is scattered across a dozen surfaces that were never designed to work together.
Christian's team ran the same loop on every question. Start with Workday Community — the obvious first stop, and often the worst. Community search is notoriously unreliable: you get threads from 2019, answers that reference deprecated functionality, links to documentation that's been reorganized twice since the post was written. If Community doesn't yield a clear answer in ten minutes, you pivot. SharePoint folders next. Then the internal wiki. Then Slack — searching for that one thread where someone mentioned this exact issue four months ago.
An hour and a half later, you have fifteen browser tabs open, three partially relevant answers, and no certainty about any of them. So you test in sandbox. Another thirty minutes. And if the sandbox results are ambiguous, you escalate — file an AMS ticket and wait.
This wasn't an occasional frustration. It was the daily reality for all four admins. Every day, each person lost 30 to 90 minutes to this cycle. Across the team, that was 10 to 15 hours per week spent not on configuration, not on strategy, not on moving the platform forward — on searching.
"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."
The cost of this wasn't just time. It was cognitive. Every context switch — from Community to SharePoint to Slack to sandbox — carried a mental tax. Admins weren't just losing minutes; they were losing focus. The deep work of actually configuring and improving Workday kept getting interrupted by the shallow work of finding information about how to configure and improve Workday.
And the organizational cost was real too. When it takes an hour to validate a simple question, you stop asking questions. You stick with what you know. You don't propose the optimization you were thinking about because you can't afford the research time to confirm it's viable. Innovation doesn't get killed by complexity — it gets killed by friction.
Our Solution
Mando replaced the entire research loop with a single starting point. Instead of Community → SharePoint → wiki → Slack → sandbox, the team now starts in Mando. Asks the question. Gets an answer grounded in Workday admin guides, validated implementation patterns, and real-world customer examples.
The answer isn't always complete — sometimes it's a pointer, sometimes it's a narrowed-down starting point. But even in the worst case, it eliminates the first hour of searching. In the best case, it resolves the question in under two minutes. Either way, the fifteen-tab rabbit hole is gone.
Daily research time dropped from 30–90 minutes per admin to 10–15 minutes. Often less. The team collectively reclaimed over 10 hours per week — time that went directly back into the configuration and strategic work they were hired to do.
The Results
Search time dropped by more than 70%. All four admins independently adopted Mando as their default starting point — not because they were told to, but because the alternative was obviously worse. The rabbit holes didn't disappear entirely. But they went from being the daily norm to a rare exception, triggered only when a question genuinely had no documented answer. For everything else, there was Mando.
Use case
02
Making $12,000/Month in AMS Actually Optional
Application Management Services contracts are the safety net of enterprise Workday teams. You pay a monthly fee, you get a fixed number of active tickets, and when something breaks or you need expertise you don't have in-house, you file a ticket and wait. It's insurance. And like all insurance, the economics only work if you're not using it for every little thing.
The problem is that most teams do.
Before Mando
Asahi Kasei was paying $12,000 per month for their AMS contract. That bought them 10 active tickets at any given time. Not 10 resolutions per month — 10 concurrent tickets in flight. Every issue that got escalated occupied a slot. Every slot occupied was a slot unavailable for the next issue.
This created a rationing dynamic that distorted how the team worked. Before filing a ticket, admins had to make a judgment call: is this problem worth one of our ten slots? Can I solve this faster myself than waiting for the AMS team to pick it up? If I use a slot on this, will we have capacity if something bigger breaks tomorrow?
The result was a team that spent significant time trying to avoid using the support they were paying $144,000 a year for. They'd attempt to self-serve — burning hours on Community searches and sandbox testing — before reluctantly filing a ticket. And when they did file, the turnaround introduced its own latency. The AMS team needed to context-switch into Asahi Kasei's environment, understand the setup, and work through the issue. Quick questions rarely got quick answers.
Eliminating the need for AMS
The AMS model isn't broken — it's just designed for a different era. It assumes that the primary bottleneck in enterprise operations is expertise: you don't have the knowledge in-house, so you rent it from a partner. And for genuinely complex, architecture-level decisions, that's still true.
But most AMS tickets aren't architecture-level. They're documentation-level. "How does this calculated field interact with that earning?" "What's the correct security group for this business process?" "Is this behavior a bug or expected?" These are questions with known answers buried in admin guides, community threads, and release notes. The knowledge exists. The team just can't find it fast enough to avoid filing a ticket.
So the AMS contract becomes a tax on findability. You're not paying for expertise — you're paying for someone else to search for answers you could have found yourself, if the search experience weren't so broken.
"We're not even using all 10 tickets. I just figure things out with Mando. It's faster."
Our Solution
Mando didn't replace the AMS partner. It replaced the need to escalate to them for routine questions. When an admin hit a configuration question, they checked Mando first. If Mando answered it — and it usually did — no ticket was filed. No slot was occupied. No latency was introduced. The question went from open to resolved in minutes instead of days.
The team still uses AMS for genuinely complex issues — the kind that require deep architectural expertise and hands-on configuration support. But those are the exception, not the default. The ratio flipped. What used to be "file a ticket for everything, self-serve when you can" became "self-serve for everything, file a ticket when you must."
The Results
AMS ticket volume dropped by 60%. Not because issues disappeared — because answers became accessible. The $12,000/month contract is still active, but it's working the way it should: handling genuine edge cases and complex architectural decisions, not serving as a search engine for questions that have documented answers.
The team reclaimed control over their own velocity. They stopped rationing support tickets and started solving problems in real time. And the budget conversation around AMS shifted from "do we need to increase our ticket count?" to "can we renegotiate down?"
Use case
02
Making $12,000/Month in AMS Actually Optional
Application Management Services contracts are the safety net of enterprise Workday teams. You pay a monthly fee, you get a fixed number of active tickets, and when something breaks or you need expertise you don't have in-house, you file a ticket and wait. It's insurance. And like all insurance, the economics only work if you're not using it for every little thing.
The problem is that most teams do.
Before Mando
Asahi Kasei was paying $12,000 per month for their AMS contract. That bought them 10 active tickets at any given time. Not 10 resolutions per month — 10 concurrent tickets in flight. Every issue that got escalated occupied a slot. Every slot occupied was a slot unavailable for the next issue.
This created a rationing dynamic that distorted how the team worked. Before filing a ticket, admins had to make a judgment call: is this problem worth one of our ten slots? Can I solve this faster myself than waiting for the AMS team to pick it up? If I use a slot on this, will we have capacity if something bigger breaks tomorrow?
The result was a team that spent significant time trying to avoid using the support they were paying $144,000 a year for. They'd attempt to self-serve — burning hours on Community searches and sandbox testing — before reluctantly filing a ticket. And when they did file, the turnaround introduced its own latency. The AMS team needed to context-switch into Asahi Kasei's environment, understand the setup, and work through the issue. Quick questions rarely got quick answers.
Eliminating the need for AMS
The AMS model isn't broken — it's just designed for a different era. It assumes that the primary bottleneck in enterprise operations is expertise: you don't have the knowledge in-house, so you rent it from a partner. And for genuinely complex, architecture-level decisions, that's still true.
But most AMS tickets aren't architecture-level. They're documentation-level. "How does this calculated field interact with that earning?" "What's the correct security group for this business process?" "Is this behavior a bug or expected?" These are questions with known answers buried in admin guides, community threads, and release notes. The knowledge exists. The team just can't find it fast enough to avoid filing a ticket.
So the AMS contract becomes a tax on findability. You're not paying for expertise — you're paying for someone else to search for answers you could have found yourself, if the search experience weren't so broken.
"We're not even using all 10 tickets. I just figure things out with Mando. It's faster."
Our Solution
Mando didn't replace the AMS partner. It replaced the need to escalate to them for routine questions. When an admin hit a configuration question, they checked Mando first. If Mando answered it — and it usually did — no ticket was filed. No slot was occupied. No latency was introduced. The question went from open to resolved in minutes instead of days.
The team still uses AMS for genuinely complex issues — the kind that require deep architectural expertise and hands-on configuration support. But those are the exception, not the default. The ratio flipped. What used to be "file a ticket for everything, self-serve when you can" became "self-serve for everything, file a ticket when you must."
The Results
AMS ticket volume dropped by 60%. Not because issues disappeared — because answers became accessible. The $12,000/month contract is still active, but it's working the way it should: handling genuine edge cases and complex architectural decisions, not serving as a search engine for questions that have documented answers.
The team reclaimed control over their own velocity. They stopped rationing support tickets and started solving problems in real time. And the budget conversation around AMS shifted from "do we need to increase our ticket count?" to "can we renegotiate down?"
Use case
02
Making $12,000/Month in AMS Actually Optional
Application Management Services contracts are the safety net of enterprise Workday teams. You pay a monthly fee, you get a fixed number of active tickets, and when something breaks or you need expertise you don't have in-house, you file a ticket and wait. It's insurance. And like all insurance, the economics only work if you're not using it for every little thing.
The problem is that most teams do.
Before Mando
Asahi Kasei was paying $12,000 per month for their AMS contract. That bought them 10 active tickets at any given time. Not 10 resolutions per month — 10 concurrent tickets in flight. Every issue that got escalated occupied a slot. Every slot occupied was a slot unavailable for the next issue.
This created a rationing dynamic that distorted how the team worked. Before filing a ticket, admins had to make a judgment call: is this problem worth one of our ten slots? Can I solve this faster myself than waiting for the AMS team to pick it up? If I use a slot on this, will we have capacity if something bigger breaks tomorrow?
The result was a team that spent significant time trying to avoid using the support they were paying $144,000 a year for. They'd attempt to self-serve — burning hours on Community searches and sandbox testing — before reluctantly filing a ticket. And when they did file, the turnaround introduced its own latency. The AMS team needed to context-switch into Asahi Kasei's environment, understand the setup, and work through the issue. Quick questions rarely got quick answers.
Eliminating the need for AMS
The AMS model isn't broken — it's just designed for a different era. It assumes that the primary bottleneck in enterprise operations is expertise: you don't have the knowledge in-house, so you rent it from a partner. And for genuinely complex, architecture-level decisions, that's still true.
But most AMS tickets aren't architecture-level. They're documentation-level. "How does this calculated field interact with that earning?" "What's the correct security group for this business process?" "Is this behavior a bug or expected?" These are questions with known answers buried in admin guides, community threads, and release notes. The knowledge exists. The team just can't find it fast enough to avoid filing a ticket.
So the AMS contract becomes a tax on findability. You're not paying for expertise — you're paying for someone else to search for answers you could have found yourself, if the search experience weren't so broken.
"We're not even using all 10 tickets. I just figure things out with Mando. It's faster."
Our Solution
Mando didn't replace the AMS partner. It replaced the need to escalate to them for routine questions. When an admin hit a configuration question, they checked Mando first. If Mando answered it — and it usually did — no ticket was filed. No slot was occupied. No latency was introduced. The question went from open to resolved in minutes instead of days.
The team still uses AMS for genuinely complex issues — the kind that require deep architectural expertise and hands-on configuration support. But those are the exception, not the default. The ratio flipped. What used to be "file a ticket for everything, self-serve when you can" became "self-serve for everything, file a ticket when you must."
The Results
AMS ticket volume dropped by 60%. Not because issues disappeared — because answers became accessible. The $12,000/month contract is still active, but it's working the way it should: handling genuine edge cases and complex architectural decisions, not serving as a search engine for questions that have documented answers.
The team reclaimed control over their own velocity. They stopped rationing support tickets and started solving problems in real time. And the budget conversation around AMS shifted from "do we need to increase our ticket count?" to "can we renegotiate down?"
Use case
03
From Reactive Admin to Strategic Operator
There's a version of the Workday admin role that's purely operational. Tickets come in. You fix things. You maintain configurations. You keep the system running. It's important work, but it's reactive by definition. The system dictates your priorities. Your calendar is shaped by what breaks.
There's another version of the role — the one that actually moves the business forward. You evaluate new modules. You optimize existing workflows. You bring proposals to leadership that make the platform more valuable. But that version requires something that most admin teams don't have: time to think.
Before Mando
Christian wasn't short on ideas. He had a running list of optimizations, feature evaluations, and workflow improvements he wanted to pursue — things like Engagement Builder, Skills Cloud, payroll streamlining. The problem was validation. Every idea required research before it could become a proposal. And research, in the pre-Mando world, meant hours of digging through documentation to answer basic feasibility questions.
So the ideas sat. Not because they were bad. Not because leadership wouldn't have been receptive. Because the time required to pressure-test them didn't exist in a schedule already consumed by break-fix work and routine research. The strategic backlog grew while the team stayed pinned to the operational treadmill.
This is the hidden cost that never shows up in a productivity metric. It's not about hours lost — it's about ideas that never get surfaced. Improvements that never get proposed. A platform that stays static not because the team lacks vision, but because they lacks bandwidth.
Most enterprise teams operate well below their strategic potential. The people running Workday, ServiceNow, or SAP often have deep knowledge of what the platform could do — if only they had time to explore it. But the daily grind of administration eats that time. Research eats that time. Searching eats that time. By the time the urgent work is handled, there's nothing left for the important work.
The result is a team that's perpetually undervalued. Leadership sees an admin group that keeps things running. They don't see the roadmap that exists in those admins' heads — the one that never makes it into a deck because no one had time to validate the assumptions behind it.
When research time dropped by 70%, something unexpected happened. The team didn't just get faster at answering questions — they started asking better ones. Christian began using Mando not just for break-fix validation but for strategic exploration. Could they enable Skills Cloud without disrupting downstream reports? What would the implementation path look like for Engagement Builder? How are other organizations handling a particular payroll configuration?
Questions that would have taken a full afternoon of research now took minutes. And because the answers came back grounded in real documentation and implementation patterns, Christian could walk into a meeting with his manager and present a validated proposal — not a tentative suggestion that needed three more weeks of scoping.
"I bring way more to my manager now because I've pressure-tested it in Mando first."
The team's relationship to their own work changed. They went from keeping Workday running to pushing it forward. Ideas that had been sitting in personal notebooks for months started making it into leadership conversations. Proposals came in faster, better-supported, and with fewer open questions. The strategic backlog started shrinking — not because anyone deprioritized it, but because the team finally had the bandwidth to work through it.
That's the shift that matters most. Mando didn't just make Asahi Kasei's Workday team faster. It made them more valuable. And Christian knows it's just the beginning.
"This is the floor. And I know it's only going up from here."
Use case
03
From Reactive Admin to Strategic Operator
There's a version of the Workday admin role that's purely operational. Tickets come in. You fix things. You maintain configurations. You keep the system running. It's important work, but it's reactive by definition. The system dictates your priorities. Your calendar is shaped by what breaks.
There's another version of the role — the one that actually moves the business forward. You evaluate new modules. You optimize existing workflows. You bring proposals to leadership that make the platform more valuable. But that version requires something that most admin teams don't have: time to think.
Before Mando
Christian wasn't short on ideas. He had a running list of optimizations, feature evaluations, and workflow improvements he wanted to pursue — things like Engagement Builder, Skills Cloud, payroll streamlining. The problem was validation. Every idea required research before it could become a proposal. And research, in the pre-Mando world, meant hours of digging through documentation to answer basic feasibility questions.
So the ideas sat. Not because they were bad. Not because leadership wouldn't have been receptive. Because the time required to pressure-test them didn't exist in a schedule already consumed by break-fix work and routine research. The strategic backlog grew while the team stayed pinned to the operational treadmill.
This is the hidden cost that never shows up in a productivity metric. It's not about hours lost — it's about ideas that never get surfaced. Improvements that never get proposed. A platform that stays static not because the team lacks vision, but because they lacks bandwidth.
Most enterprise teams operate well below their strategic potential. The people running Workday, ServiceNow, or SAP often have deep knowledge of what the platform could do — if only they had time to explore it. But the daily grind of administration eats that time. Research eats that time. Searching eats that time. By the time the urgent work is handled, there's nothing left for the important work.
The result is a team that's perpetually undervalued. Leadership sees an admin group that keeps things running. They don't see the roadmap that exists in those admins' heads — the one that never makes it into a deck because no one had time to validate the assumptions behind it.
When research time dropped by 70%, something unexpected happened. The team didn't just get faster at answering questions — they started asking better ones. Christian began using Mando not just for break-fix validation but for strategic exploration. Could they enable Skills Cloud without disrupting downstream reports? What would the implementation path look like for Engagement Builder? How are other organizations handling a particular payroll configuration?
Questions that would have taken a full afternoon of research now took minutes. And because the answers came back grounded in real documentation and implementation patterns, Christian could walk into a meeting with his manager and present a validated proposal — not a tentative suggestion that needed three more weeks of scoping.
"I bring way more to my manager now because I've pressure-tested it in Mando first."
The team's relationship to their own work changed. They went from keeping Workday running to pushing it forward. Ideas that had been sitting in personal notebooks for months started making it into leadership conversations. Proposals came in faster, better-supported, and with fewer open questions. The strategic backlog started shrinking — not because anyone deprioritized it, but because the team finally had the bandwidth to work through it.
That's the shift that matters most. Mando didn't just make Asahi Kasei's Workday team faster. It made them more valuable. And Christian knows it's just the beginning.
"This is the floor. And I know it's only going up from here."
Use case
03
From Reactive Admin to Strategic Operator
There's a version of the Workday admin role that's purely operational. Tickets come in. You fix things. You maintain configurations. You keep the system running. It's important work, but it's reactive by definition. The system dictates your priorities. Your calendar is shaped by what breaks.
There's another version of the role — the one that actually moves the business forward. You evaluate new modules. You optimize existing workflows. You bring proposals to leadership that make the platform more valuable. But that version requires something that most admin teams don't have: time to think.
Before Mando
Christian wasn't short on ideas. He had a running list of optimizations, feature evaluations, and workflow improvements he wanted to pursue — things like Engagement Builder, Skills Cloud, payroll streamlining. The problem was validation. Every idea required research before it could become a proposal. And research, in the pre-Mando world, meant hours of digging through documentation to answer basic feasibility questions.
So the ideas sat. Not because they were bad. Not because leadership wouldn't have been receptive. Because the time required to pressure-test them didn't exist in a schedule already consumed by break-fix work and routine research. The strategic backlog grew while the team stayed pinned to the operational treadmill.
This is the hidden cost that never shows up in a productivity metric. It's not about hours lost — it's about ideas that never get surfaced. Improvements that never get proposed. A platform that stays static not because the team lacks vision, but because they lacks bandwidth.
Most enterprise teams operate well below their strategic potential. The people running Workday, ServiceNow, or SAP often have deep knowledge of what the platform could do — if only they had time to explore it. But the daily grind of administration eats that time. Research eats that time. Searching eats that time. By the time the urgent work is handled, there's nothing left for the important work.
The result is a team that's perpetually undervalued. Leadership sees an admin group that keeps things running. They don't see the roadmap that exists in those admins' heads — the one that never makes it into a deck because no one had time to validate the assumptions behind it.
When research time dropped by 70%, something unexpected happened. The team didn't just get faster at answering questions — they started asking better ones. Christian began using Mando not just for break-fix validation but for strategic exploration. Could they enable Skills Cloud without disrupting downstream reports? What would the implementation path look like for Engagement Builder? How are other organizations handling a particular payroll configuration?
Questions that would have taken a full afternoon of research now took minutes. And because the answers came back grounded in real documentation and implementation patterns, Christian could walk into a meeting with his manager and present a validated proposal — not a tentative suggestion that needed three more weeks of scoping.
"I bring way more to my manager now because I've pressure-tested it in Mando first."
The team's relationship to their own work changed. They went from keeping Workday running to pushing it forward. Ideas that had been sitting in personal notebooks for months started making it into leadership conversations. Proposals came in faster, better-supported, and with fewer open questions. The strategic backlog started shrinking — not because anyone deprioritized it, but because the team finally had the bandwidth to work through it.
That's the shift that matters most. Mando didn't just make Asahi Kasei's Workday team faster. It made them more valuable. And Christian knows it's just the beginning.
"This is the floor. And I know it's only going up from here."
See how Mando can transform your team's knowledge
See how leading organizations use Mando to preserve institutional knowledge and accelerate onboarding.
See how Mando can transform your team's knowledge
See how leading organizations use Mando to preserve institutional knowledge and accelerate onboarding.
See how Mando can transform your team's knowledge
See how leading organizations use Mando to preserve institutional knowledge and accelerate onboarding.
Clarity across every corner of your most mission critical applications
Solutions
Company
Clarity across every corner of your most mission critical applications
Solutions
Company
Clarity across every corner of your most mission critical applications
Solutions
Company