Cutting absenteeism from 8% to 4% in six months with a custom absence management workflow

The problem

Airbus employs around 56,000 people across 16 European manufacturing sites. Across the UK manufacturing base, staff absence had risen to roughly 8%, and demand was growing. Leadership worked out that bringing absence down to around 3% would free enough productive capacity to meet that demand without hiring anyone.

That needed two things Airbus didn't have: a dependable way for employees to report absence, and a system that triggered the right management action at each stage of it.

Airbus first evaluated an SAP-native build, and rejected it, too slow to deliver, too expensive, and too hard to customise site by site.

What we built

We designed and built RETURNS, a five-stage absence-management workflow on .NET and SQL Server. The name is the point: getting people back to work safely, with support at every step.

• Register, within two hours of shift start, the absent employee calls an automated line. The IVR identifies them, records the reason and captures the expected return date.
• Enlighten, registration triggers the workflows: line manager notified, SAP updated, occupational health alerted, confirmation letter sent to the employee.
• Track, any absence past three days requires a conversation with a company nurse or doctor, which can open appointments or follow-ups.
• Return, back at work, the manager completes an electronic return-to-work assessment within a set timeframe, with the absence history pulled in automatically.
• Support, where needed: physiotherapy or counselling referrals, or a temporary change of duties while someone recovers.

RETURNS runs alongside SAP rather than inside it. A BAPI interface writes absence data back to standard SAP infotypes on case closure, the responsiveness of a bespoke .NET application, with SAP still the system of record. And because the call trees, escalation thresholds, letters and forms are all configurable, each site adapts the workflow without a rebuild, the property that made a Europe-wide rollout realistic.

The result

Absence halved, from 8% to 4%, within six months. Airbus's own arithmetic values each percentage point at £1m in recovered productivity, the capacity case that justified the project in the first place.

Beyond the headline number, RETURNS gave Airbus automated absence data collection, consistent control of the process, rich reporting, and visibility for managers, occupational health and employees alike. The system went in across all UK manufacturing sites, with a Europe-wide rollout planned on the back of its per-site configurability, and SAP integration arrived through the BAPI interface, without the SAP-native development route Airbus had originally rejected.