We had the opportunity to attend ADP yearly user conference "Meeting of the Minds" (MOTM), held from March 31st till April 3rd, 2019. Attendance with over 1100 attendees, the usual attendance of MOTM, held at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. An ideal location for conferences of this size, given the short distances between venue, rooms and entertainment.
Prefer to watch – here is my event video … (if the video doesn't' show up – check here)
Here is the 1 slide condensation (if the slide doesn't show up, check here):
Want to read on? Here you go:
Wisely front and center – The keynote only had one single major product pitch (apart from the perennial success story of the ADP mobile app), the new daily pay capabilities that ADP has acquired with Wisely. Business needs and benefits were well explained, and it was clear that ADP wanted all MOTM attendees go back home with a good understanding on what Wisely can do for them, now that it's part of ADP. Let's hope this will help underfinanced and underbanked employees, where there seem to be more than expected these days.
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| Politi introduces Wisely |
ADP Momentum in Workforce Management – In a separate briefing I learnt more about the ADP traction in Workforce Management that is more significant than frankly I expected. While Time and Attendance capabilities are prominent, and larger customer benefit from the partnership of ADP with Kronos, ADP has carved out a very substantial install base for Workforce Management with 70k+ customers who use not only time management, but also clocks and scheduling. With that install base and ADP's R&D commitment, ADP has certainly be counted for as a Workforce Management vendor.
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| Thomas with event stats |
New Customer Success Program – Customer Success is vital, especially in the cloud age that is catalyzed by the speed of bad news travelling on social media… and ADP has experienced a small but notable attrition over its past. Evidently management does not want to see that anymore, so a new customer success program is in place, with more dedicated customer success personnel in place. Being in the rollout, it's to early to judge success in the market and in regards of customer attrition, but kudos for ADP to address one of the weaknesses in its business that have been around for decades.
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| Cambern with ADP Mobile Priogress |
New HR Core and Payroll MIA – Surprisingly, after mentioning both new products – ADP's new HR Core product Lifion and ADP's new Payroll (code names 'Pi') as the 2018 edition off MOTM – no mention this year. Usually you see a growth curve in customer communication on new products a user conferences, ADP opted for a different course. We know the products are well on the way in beta and production in different geographies, so the decision is hard to understand. The good news for ADP is, in random conversations with MOTM attendees – they do not seem to miss that. But then – do they know that ADP has a great performance management / team management capability with the TMBC assets? A pretty good gig economy solution with WorkMarket? Not mentioning these capabilities and potentially seeing customer look elsewhere is not productive for ADP.
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| The ADP AI Philosophy |
MyPOV
A good user conference for ADP, with happy attendees. Good mixture of product and services vs. entertainment, with a little too much entertainment for my personal taste. Good to see the Wisely acquisition front and center in the keynote and attendees took note. Good to see ADP addressing its 'efficiency' problem in customer retention with the new customer success program. Even 5% (a random number I picked) customer churn can be expensive in the cloud era, so it's good to see ADP addressing this. And ADP keeps the good news under wraps, e.g. it's momentum in Workforce Management. After the briefing I checked with some colleagues, it's totally possible I missed something here, but they were equally surprised. As much as I admire comeback and solid product development, some level of marketing, roadmap, product updates need to happen … before tens of thousands of customers are live on a key business capability.On the concern side, ADP is to shy to give ADP MOTM attendees the product updates that they deserve. A roller coaster event-based communication strategy like on Lifion and PI does not make sense. The irony is that it usually predicts product issues and delays, and that is not the case for ADP at the moment. When the cat is out of the bag, you need to keep talking about how it is doing, developing etc. One of the big mysteries of my analyst career.
But overall a good event for ADP, customers are happy and look forward to use and adopt new capabilities in the ADP Data Cloud (AI was another push at MOTM) and realize what they can do with Wisely. I guess it's a step at a time and ADP wants to pick the steps customers can and should take.
