We have the opportunity to attend ADP’s annual user conference for large enterprise customers – happening in Orlando right now. The conference is well attended with over a 1000 attendees.
Here are my top 3 takeaways from today’s keynote:
It’s a new ADP – Gone are the days of ADP being the grey and boring back office payroll specialist. The executive team cracked more jokes than to be able to account for here – and most of them making fun of themselves. I wasn’t there – but that did not happen 5-6 Meetings of the Minds (MOTM) ago as attendees are telling me. The new ADP is social and lets their employees wear jeans and … bring their dogs to work (!). Quite a cultural change for a large enterprise but it’s good to see it lived and energizing employees and with that customers and partners.
A complete vision – ADP CEO Rodriguez walked the audience through the company’s vision - using a hire to retire perspective coupled with the ADP strengths on service and compliance. It was a good setup for the rest of the keynote – though it could have been connected more with the following parts of the keynote. For instance the insight component came too short in my view. But what hasn’t happened can still be and the conference just started.
Compelling product demo – Later in the keynote Mark Benjamin and Mike Capone engaged in a very good (and entertaining) presentation of the upcoming employee self-service user interface. Not only did the new user experience look well and easy to use – but it also showed the ADP higher ground around payroll and compliance. Seeing take home pay when electing benefits, showing overtime correctly calculated in a paycheck and swapping shifts were impressive highlights of the demo. Customers will see the new user interface first late summer / early fall.
MyPOV
An encouraging start of the MOTM conference. It’s good to see ADP not blindly imitating other leading HCM vendors but looking for a differentiating position, leveraging its strengths and bringing in a different perspective to the HCM automation game. Now it's key to see that ADP delivers innovation across a complex product portfolio and learn from customers what they see and how they feel on the progress. More to come in the next two days.
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You can find a Storify collection of Keynote tweets here.
More on ADP
ADP innovates with with verve and good timing – read here
And more on the importance of the paycheck:
Could the paycheck re-invent HCM – yes it can – read here.
And suddenly, payroll matters again! Read here.
