Automatic Data Processing—better known as ADP, the payroll service to much of the world—went into the big data platform business on May 12. And why not, with more than 600,000 client businesses and 24 million employees in the U.S. alone from which to access piles of metadata.
Roseland, N.J.-based ADP is the payroll accounting service that uses its aggregate metadata to generate a monthly jobs report that is respected by many economists. In fact, because it is the largest payroll processor in the nation, ADP’s vast big data silo from U.S. companies and their employees ranks second only to the employee records of the U.S. federal government.
So ADP has started to use all that data for a new business wing: a big data-based cloud service. ADP DataCloud is designed to put day-to-day analytics capabilities in the hands of line-of-business accounting and HR staff members, enabling them to obtain insights from the workforce data already embedded in their individual ADP human capital management systems.
ADP DataCloud aims to boost business and workforce management goals, such as workforce productivity, talent development, retention and the identification of flight risks. More than 1,000 ADP clients already are using these analytics capabilities.
ADP DataCloud provides companies with critical information that can help answer key questions facing not only HR, but the overall business. A consumer-grade user experience blended with analytics allows clients to obtain deep enterprise insights across the organization’s HCM data. The embedded big data platform is within ADP’s core solutions, including ADP Vantage HCM, Enterprise HR, ADP Workforce Now and ADP Time & Attendance.
Key features include the following:
- Benchmarking: Offers companies the ability to compare HCM metrics with an aggregated and anonymous market benchmark at the industry, location and job-title level to inform key workforce decisions.
- Data exchange: Provides companies with the ability to combine workforce data with other types of business data, such as sales or customer satisfaction scores, from non-ADP platforms to identify key deeper business insights and actions.
- Predictive analytics: Utilizes predictive models derived from ADP data to help employers make smarter, forward-looking workforce decisions by providing insight into the likelihood of specific workforce management outcomes. The first capability helps employers identify those employees likely to leave their organization.
A new research project commissioned by ADP found that 75 percent of companies with 1,000 or more employees have access to data to inform business decisions, but only 46 percent are using workforce analytics capabilities to improve business decision making. The same study found that 42 percent of company finance executives and 32 percent of midlevel managers want to utilize workforce analytics.
The study consisted of a 2015 survey of 300 HR executives, finance executives and managers at companies with 1,000+ employees.