This past week ADP brought its Meeting of the Minds (MoTM) customer event to the ‘Big Peach,’ Atlanta, Georgia, hosting nearly 1,600 attendees at its annual user conference.
While ADP calls Roseland, New Jersey, headquarters, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more ‘ADP city’ within its ecosystem than ‘The ATL’. With its massive campus well-entrenched in the Alpharetta suburb and Atlanta community for decades, ADP was practically at home.
As always, ADP put on a tremendous event, packed with notable guest speakers, thought-provoking content, great entertainment and robust networking. Of special mention was the ‘events within an event’ at MoTM – the annual ADP Executive Strategy Summit and Global Partner Summit, which included a range of executive leaders and key ADP partners seeking to learn and share in emerging human capital management best practices and innovations.
HCM technology is clearly in focus
ADP will soon celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2024, and is now supporting one million customer organizations, paying over 40 million workers globally, including one in six workers in the U.S. and 14 million beyond its borders and processing $2.7 trillion in payroll and taxes annually on behalf of its U.S. customers.
Beyond its well-documented legacy of payroll dominance, the firm is more committed, capable and strategically focused than ever on co-designing the future of human capital management (HCM) technology. HCM technology stole the show as the center of most of the conversations and was the dominant focus area and key buying decision for many prospective buyers attending MoTM.
I met several HR leaders and executives over two days at the conference. Many were juggling an HCM platform buying decision, often replacing existing solutions they had outgrown as they looked to support planned growth. Interestingly most were emerging, middle-market organizations with ADP on their shortlist among the most mature HCM technology solution providers.
Remember that ADP didn’t get here overnight. For the past five-plus years, ADP has made significant investments and fueled a relentless focus on advancing its suite of HCM platform solutions and demonstrating its innovation. ADP’s steady investment and focus on HCM technology, and its “Always Designing for People” mantra are clearly resonating with buyers.
ADP’s product focus
The theme for MoTM was “Leading with Confidence”, something every business leader could use a little help in what feels like incredibly uncertain times. HR leaders are juggling increasingly complex workforce demands, a moving target of global compliance requirements and emerging economic challenges. The leaders I spoke to throughout the week were keenly focused on increasing productivity, activating their data and valuable insights and enabling more agility for their organizations.
ADP’s product design focus, across its technology, services and solutions, center on creating more proactive, predictive and personalized experiences for both the practitioner and the employee.
ADP’s cognitive capability is, of course, underpinned by the ADP DataCloud, which leverages the anonymized data across its one million customers to provide deep insights and benchmarks to drive highly personalized and informed decision-making and improved outcomes.
The infusion of AI, ML and NLP, paired with ADP DataCloud insights, will play a prominent role in the product ecosystem and UX, with chatbots, enabled to support conversational, transactional and predictive capabilities that will address a wide range of service delivery and employee engagement use cases moving ahead.
ADP Global Partner Summit Recap
Down the hall from the Executive Strategy Summit, ADP welcomed over 70 partners from nearly 40 companies across its partner ecosystem for further insights at its fourth ADP Global Partner Summit. ADP began with a sneak preview of the soon-to-be-released 2023 payroll research report. Key findings from the report included:
- Over 60% of multinational companies indicate a cybersecurity breach has impacted their payroll operations in the recent 12 months
- Nearly half of the respondents cited difficulty finding skilled payroll practitioners ‘fit for the future’, with 64% looking to non-payroll resources to staff payroll
- Other top themes are the imperatives to address payroll scale and accuracy, which have dropped nearly 20% since COVID-19, and the opportunity to see payroll data ‘unlocked’ for greater impact on top-level strategy and growth.
ADP product leaders showcased evolving capabilities for employees to include Intelligent Self Service that will anticipate, solve, and reduce employee cases before they happen using action cards to remind or nudge (e.g., missed time punch), virtual assistant conversational and transactional chatbot and increasingly global earned wage access features.
ADP’s global plans
The highlight of this year’s ADP Global Partner Summit was a format comprised of three-person panels for each of ADP’s major global offerings, sharing updates on the product roadmap, implementation and customer service operations.
First up, the panel for global payroll solutions by Celergo-Streamline, who led with the clarification that legacy Streamline customers with no compelling reason to switch platforms are welcome to remain in their current model for at least the next five years. Flooded with 50% growth year-over-year from 2021 to 2022, Celergo-Streamline has overcome its growing pains with new features such as ADP Marketplace, Insight Dashboard, Client Central (onboarding) and Global MyView adoption that has reached 1.2m visitors/month. Integration support for both Workday and Oracle has deepened. All manner of HCM integrations has been consolidated under a single team lead, with the deployment model shifting to a “local first” approach with more direct communications between local teams. Service operations added more than 800 hires to ramp-up capacity and have launched its ADP Knowledge Academy.
The GlobalView leader panel shared its geographic growth, which included acquiring Sage South Africa in 2022 and 2023-2024 expansion to include Morocco, Israel and Macau. It was interesting to learn that 90% of all new customers chose managed payroll services last year, possibly pointing to the lack of skilled resources in the marketplace.
Implementation highlights included the option for customers to choose either waterfall or agile deployment. Meanwhile, ADP highlighted the ability to support both centralized and decentralized customer support models and new ways to act on behalf of customers (e.g., data cleansing, error correction) and drive outcomes.
The final global panel represented ADP’s upmarket Workforce Management solutions. If you have lost track of the roadmap of time and the absence products, there are now three options: ADP Workforce Now Essential Time, ADP Total Absence Management and ADP Workforce Manager.
Enterprise customers with advanced scheduling requirements will likely look to ADP Workforce Management (WFM), a white-labeled version of UKG Workforce Dimensions. ADP differentiates the offering through incremental investments to complement the UKG partner subscription, including compliance on demand, touchless time kiosks and intelligent integration between WFM and HR (Employee Data Assignment). The solution is available in over 120 countries and 12 languages, including single sign-on and shortcuts between HCM and WFM mobile apps and a regional 24/7 support model.
