big data

ADP’s Meeting of the Minds event in late March brought together approximately 1,000 of its clients for three days of networking, continuing education, and showcasing of some of its latest thinking and newest capabilities. In back-to-back sessions throughout the day I was there, I met with leaders across the company’s different offerings to gain insights into how they were addressing important marketplace issues.

Three major areas stood out during these conversations:

1. Rising expectations: These days, clients are expecting their service providers to deliver benefits extending far beyond cost savings. To address this, ADP is leveraging DataCloud – its big data platform – and taking advantage of millions of employee records to deliver benchmarking and insights through analytics, including those that help its clients gauge the risk of losing valued employees. In the coming months, clients will also be able to pull in data from outside sources, and attend “Benchmarking Bootcamps” to help them understand data and what they can do with it. To provide the “proof in the pudding,” the three-day event featured 25 ADP clients sharing their stories on how ADP was enabling HR to become more involved in their company’s overall business strategy.
2. Addressing the pay gap: One of ADPs newest capabilities – the Pay Equity Explorer – is aimed at doing away with still rampant pay gaps. (Note: According to the US Census Bureau, the average woman earns 20 percent less than her male counterpart.) This dashboard, backed with analytics, identifies roles and geographies in which potential pay gaps exist, negatively impacting women and minorities. Once a potential pay gap is identified, the tool has drill down capabilities to pinpoint specific people, quantify their pay gap, review their past performance, and mark them as potentially needing corrective action via an off-cycle market adjustment to pay. When you consider the looming talent shortage – there are 6 million fewer resources ages 40 to 49 than there are in the starting-to-retire 50 to 59 age group – not to mention hiring and training costs, retaining resources by ensuring they feel valued and appreciated is critical.
3. Orchestration over outsourcing: At Everest Group, we believe that the next generation HR service delivery model needs to be focused on a seamless employee experience, often referred to as the “Amazon experience,” rather than the traditional model of siloed HR processes that lead to a poor employee experience. The approach requires all of the components of Human Capital Management (HCM) be brought together, including payroll services, talent management, HR management, time and attendance, and benefits administration, and then delivered as an integrated solution via BPaaS. ADP seems to have grasped the importance of delivering an end-to-end solution that improves the user experience and harvests information across multiple processes from a single platform, making it easier to apply analytics to uncover cause and effect relationships. The company also developed a mobile app via which users can access and print pay, manage their teams, track and approve time, and review their 401K.

My takeaways from the event are that it appears ADP is building upon its strengths to satisfy market requirements, and making strides to improve its consultative approach to HR services and better leverage ADP DataCloud across offerings to provide more insightful and advanced analytics.

The current tumultuous times represent significant opportunities for service providers that continue to invest in end-to-end capabilities and analytical tools that drive insights to enable better business outcomes.