At ADP’s recent annual Meeting of the Minds (MOTM) client conference, CEO Carlos Rodriguez stated ADP’s commitment to now being 100% focused on Human Capital Management (HCM) following the spin-off of its Dealer Services business in 2014. This was the largest conference yet with ~1,100 clients from 500 different companies attending, and several client case studies illustrated ADP’s focus on delivering an improved user experience with ease of use and reliability, proactivity and increased efficiency.

ADP has ~610,000 clients in 100 countries with 490,000 cloud clients running its HCM solutions, equating to 35 million active users. ADP is implementing a new user experience across all of its platforms, including enhanced reporting and analytics capability with ADP DataCloud.

ADP DataCloud is fully integrated and transparent across all platforms and, aside from the type of reporting and analytics you would expect, it is also truly predictive. For example, not only is turnover data available compared to ADP benchmark data, but it can run a report at organizational level to predict the ‘flight risk’ of an employee leaving based on certain parameters, including performance rating and salary. Employee engagement and satisfaction scores can also be utilized to determine flight risk.

Not all vendor analytics offerings have predictive capability, and this is an important inclusion. More generally, analytics across HRO are underutilized at present. However, the good news is that action is being taken. For example, NelsonHall estimates that in the next 12 months 70% of RPO providers are increasing their investment in analytics. And in MPHRO, a top priority for providers in terms of service improvement is to ramp-up their analytics offerings, led by workforce analytics tools, benchmarking and predictive analytics. This will be significant in helping HR in its mission to demonstrate value to the business. 

Contributing to the new user experience is ADP’s Innovation Lab which opened its new HQ office in 2014 in New York City, strategically located to attract experienced talent. The majority of staff in the center were hired from outside ADP from brand name companies and include designers, anthropologists, data scientists, front-end architects, cognitive computing engineers, and product owners. Design is customer-centric, incorporating client input, and with clients being brought into the center to test new software.   An example of a client-led design improvement is Vantage Tax Smart Compliance, which has ~200k users: twenty screens previously required for reconciling tax filings were reduced to just one.

Many HCM companies today provide technology but not services. Even some HCM service providers have opted to focus primarily on technology due to client demand and the growth of Cloud HCM technology. However, ADP has made it clear that it is focused on providing both HCM technology and services in its quest to be seen as the complete HCM provider.