Promises of rooftop gardens and new user experience from ADP’s trendy NYC warehouse:

From a hip warehouse full of juice bars, fun areas to work and original red brick walls, the theme of the 2014 ADP Analyst Event was ADP is “All in on HCM”, reinforcing its commitment to HCM following the Dealer Services spin off.  The event, newly opened Research Lab in Chelsea, NYC, conveyed an intention to drive greater focus on its HR product suite.

ADP presented its HCM model which covers all processes from recruitment to retirement, and is supported its:

• Technology
• Services: support, compliance, insight/analytics
• Research Lab. 

Technology: current investments are focused on the user interface to U.S. centric products Workforce Now (for the mid-market) and Vantage (for large enterprises). Functional developments and partnerships include:

• Mobile talent solutions
• Talent acquisition
• Career development / learning paths
• Health compliance
• Analytics
• Document cloud.

The aim is to expand these offering to additional ADP products (such as GlobalView) and geographies over time. If we look at current geographic coverage:

• In the last year ADP added four new countries to its GlobalView platform (South Arica, Turkey, Vietnam and Argentina) which are supported through Streamline, for local payroll services. Four more countries are planned for FY 2015
• Workforce Now and Vantage both currently support 34 countries as multi-country HR systems with an ability to integrate to Streamline for payroll services.

ADP’s roadmap also includes functional enhancements to its analytics and benchmarking offerings, social collaboration and the building of the ADP Marketplace. The developers.adp.com sandbox has been available since March, and will be available to the wider market in the fall. ADP’s HCM marketplace will enable clients to purchase partner apps and integrations directly from ADP.

Services: investments in talent process capability. The few investments ADP has made to date in talent processes have significant implications. It is expanding its focus from pure payroll and HR administration and beginning to offer more value-based HR services. Investments include developing service support for non-payroll processes such as HR administration, contact center, as well as the talent administration processes. Two months ago ADP established a team to provide talent management processes owners who can drive and consult with clients on talent process improvements.

Research: ADP has been delivering the National Employment Report since 2006. ADP is introducing a new quarterly workforce index report, with publication planned for October. This new publication will provide data by state, company size, tenure, gender, age, industry, and FT/PT status to provide insights on job turnover, retention, hourly wage growth and growth in hours worked. It will support the big data aspects of the analytics product to present competitive data of how your company is performing against competition.

In its FY 2014, (excluding Dealer Services ADP enjoyed revenue growth of 8% to $10.3bn in FY 2014, +8% (excluding Dealer Services, unaudited). Approximately 80% of its revenues are from the U.S. Recent growth engines have been its multi-country payroll services (20-30%) and its RPO business (around 20%).

ADP is making a timely move closer to the pure HR space. Manager and employee self-service across HR and payroll are important today. Having an integrated user experience across different HR processes together with a strong reporting capability and visibility of data is critical for effective management.

With investment plans in place and a clear roadmap outlined for each of its products and services, ADP is well positioned to be able to support organizations’ future HR needs. U.S. based organizations could benefit from a face-lift of their current MSS and ESS capabilities, with new features and analytics embedded. ADP will be offering an integrated HCM product that can scale to serve additional geographies to support expansions. We look forward to hearing of news of customer adoption across its client base - and seeing the roof garden development next year.