At its Meeting of the Minds (MOTM) conference last week, ADP explained its focus on full provision of services, technology, and continuous innovation, and presented recent examples, including delivery of ~10m 1095 forms in the U.S. as part of ACA, deployment of a new ‘user experience’, and the launch of ADP Onboarding. Long-established as a provider of global payroll services, ADP also explained how it is now offering global benefits management services.

In partnership with Thomsons Online Benefits, ADP is now offering global benefits management via the cloud, with Darwin software used to provide global employee benefits administration. ADP Enterprise Benefits is a centralized, yet locally integrated, platform supported by ADP’s managed services. It is country and benefit agnostic, and does not need to be hard-coded to a specific country. Benefits can be configured at local level, which includes setting up employee data from a client local system of record or, if they are an ADP GlobalView client, from the GlobalView platform.  Currently 75 countries and 26 languages can be supported, with 100 countries contracted to be live by end of 2016.

Client drivers for adopting global benefits management include:

• One system to manage a global and diverse workforce, with increasingly complex legislation in each country
• A standardized user/employee experience in any country in their own language, e.g. enrollment in benefits
• Globally aggregated analytics to obtain actionable workforce data. Examples include understanding who is utilizing which benefits by country with the ability to drill down into demographic data
• Global insight into spend (according to a recent Thomsons Online Benefits survey, 44% of companies do not know what they spent on benefits)
• Ability to provide total rewards statements globally, contributing to increased employee engagement.

In a live demo, several benefits of the global system were apparent, including:

• Ability to toggle to a local country and see a total rewards statement of salary and benefits (plus additional benefits available)
• Depiction of ‘% of salary’ by basic salary, finance and protection (i.e. life insurance, disability), and lifestyle benefits
• Analytics showing a global overview of headcount, spend (including spend per headcount, spend over time), and benefits utilization (including login rate by demographic)
• Map-based analysis of spend by country, along with usage of medical and wellness, etc.

ADP has yet to build its own global client base for this new offering, but examples of Thomson Online Benefits clients include a tech consumer products company in 44 countries and a manufacturer in 19 countries. Clients using the Thomsons global system include Volkswagen, Microsoft, Samsung, Visa, and NCR.

ADP will primarily target existing clients using ADP GlobalView (available in ~110 countries for large MNCs), which currently has ~1,120 clients. The provision of global benefits will be attractive to MNCs, and we would expect a good proportion of ADP’s clients to adopt the new offering. Deployment times vary depending on the number of countries involved (a 52-country deployment took 18 months, ~3 countries per month). 

More generally, ADP will continue to focus on product and service innovation (a key theme of the MOTM conference) by working with clients via its 55 product advisory councils and the ADP Innovation Labs.