Workday and ADP partner to Deliver a Seamless Customer Experience for Global Payroll

Workday has its European Rising event happening in Dublin this week and one of the major product news has been an improved level of partnership with ADP.

Let's take a peek:

If you can't watch - let’s take apart the press release in our customary style – it can be found here:

PLEASANTON, CA--(Marketwired - Dec 2, 2015) - Workday, Inc. (NYSE: WDAY), a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, today announced plans to expand its partnership with ADP to provide multinational organizations with a seamless and unified global payroll experience. The partnership plans to leverage the next level in integration technology to unite Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and ADP Global Payroll in a single user experience within Workday, enabling multinational organizations to more effectively manage their global workforce, efficiently process payroll, and maximize business growth.

MyPOV – Good description of problem and solution. ADP provides global payroll capabilities through its GlobalView product and Workday has global customers, so this is a ‘symbiotic’ partnership.

"With this expanded partnership, our customers will be able to manage their workforce globally and process payroll in over 100 countries," said Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and CEO, Workday. "This is the new standard for integration -- bringing together two leaders for best-in-class HCM and payroll in one seamless global solution."
"ADP's increased collaboration with Workday tightly aligns market leaders to deliver a seamless global payroll experience," said Carlos Rodriguez, president and CEO, ADP. "Through the partnership, we will help our joint multinational customers effectively address the complexity of global payroll so that they can focus on driving their business forward."

MyPOV –Good to see this is a partnership supported all the way from the top – with quotes from both CEOs, Bhusri and Rodriquez. The perspectives are worth noting – Bhusri sees global payroll capabilities, Rodriguez sees peace of mind from payroll complexity for customers as the main drivers.

Through the partnership, Workday customers will benefit from:
· One Seamless Customer Experience to Manage a Global Workforce:
o Multinational organizations can leverage ADP Global Payroll functionality from within Workday's user interface in one process for managing their global workforce.
o Customers can enter comprehensive local data directly into Workday where it is automatically validated and utilized by ADP to create a more streamlined global payroll experience.

MyPOV – This is the key innovation part of the integration. In order to run payroll in one single UI – something most enterprises prefer – payroll relevant information needs to be in the same user interface as the rest of ‘HCM’. As payroll is subject to many legal changes, it previously required the HCM vendor and any payroll partner vendor(s) to both that does not have payroll to provide all fields and validation necessary to run payroll correctly. Obviously a duplicate effort for vendors – and both ADP and Workday went for a more elegant solution.

· Next-level Integration Technology to Create a Unified User Experience:
o Workday combines the latest advances in integration technology with ADP's REST APIs to enable dynamic page creation, rendering the fields for local payroll information from ADP so multinational organizations can better manage payroll requirements around the world.
o Legislative updates from ADP can be made on a timely basis via the Workday user interface, ensuring that customers are up to date with country-specific and local regulatory changes for a smoother payroll process.

MyPOV – And here we are to the ‘magic’ – REST as an API standard allows ADP to expose fields and validation directly into Workday – creating one common user interface for workers – and making duplicate coding and testing superfluous.

· A Best-in-Class Approach to Global Payroll Management:
o Multinational organizations looking to invest in Workday and ADP's best-in-class HR and global payroll solutions can take advantage of a seamless experience for global payroll management.
o Workday HCM enables multinational organizations to make faster decisions, gain operational visibility, prepare for future talent shifts, and build effective teams.
o As the proven leader in payroll, customers benefit from ADP's extensive global payroll coverage and unparalleled expertise in payroll processing.

MyPOV – Good to point out the benefits – Workday provides a more seamless global payroll experience and will be able to spend more time on additional product innovation for its customers and ADP gets more utilization of its payroll capabilities. But the biggest winners are the users at clients: On an operational level they will be able to do all HCM related tasks in one common API, and on a management level they have the peace of mind of working with a proven Payroll leader with ADP.

Availability Workday plans to make solutions resulting from the expanded partnership with ADP available in Workday 27, which will be offered to customers in the second half of calendar year 2016.

MyPOV – There are few things not to like about this partnership, except for this very late and 12 months or so out delivery date. But good things take time…

Overall MyPOV

A good partnership with a modern integration technique between ADP and Workday – who both benefit as vendors. As the world goes – it is a co-opetition – as ADP will keep providing HCM solutions that compete with Workday.

But the winner is the joint customer, and a large part of Workday customers use ADP as their payroll partner. So good news for these customers, as they don’t have two vendors tracking legislative payroll compliance and spending precious development time and dollars duplicating and integrating fields, but just with one. On the global side it gives Workday customers and prospects access to over 100 countries for processing payroll – given that Workday as of today only supports the USA, Canada, and UK (and France in 2016) - a major leap going forward. Certainly a key strategy move to expand in Europe, where the announcement was made. Whether it will alleviate the pressure on Workday to provide native payroll capabilities for other large markets (with large customers, Germany and Japan come to mind) remains to be seen.

And we expect more of these partnership in the marketplace – based on REST APIs, something that to our knowledge Learning vendor Skillsoft first introduced into the marketplace almost a decade ago (but to be fair - with a more one directional nature of the interface).

For now a very good partnership, which also shows that market adversaries can be partners for the benefit of the customer. As heard often before – ‘at the end the customer has to won’ – and that’s what is the clear end result of this partnership is – so congrats for all are in order.

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Workday and ADP partner to Deliver a Seamless Customer Experience for Global Payroll

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