ADP – “Senior Leadership Perspective on ADP”

Pros

Very good health and child care savings accounts. ADP supports ongoing training, both in house and when budgets allow, external training to keep their associates current. Salaries are reasonable at the Director level and above.

Cons

Poor benefits; limited vacation allowance, expensive medical plans.

ADP's lack of infrastructure investment is disturbing. The technology behind virtually all of their products is old, lagging behind their competitors and there is little support to upgrade. ADP's success is due to outselling their competition; senior executive management right up to Gary Butler agree that their products are not the best, but that they can outsell and out service the competition. Their sales staff are adept at steering away from product functionality because it doesn't compare to the competition. Where their competitors have automated through technology, ADP continues to struggle through labor intensive manual error prone processing.

The company is hopelessly siloed with three disparate sales and service organizations which are based on their client's employee size; SBS (Small Business Services - less than 100 employees), Majors (between 100 and 999 employees) and Nationals (1000 employees or more). ADP does not have a central CRM solution, instead there are dozens of sales and service databases that do not talk with one another. This is a source of huge frustration for their clients and their own associates.

Advice to Senior Management

While ADP's margins are impressive, as is it's AAA credit rating, however, it's time to reinvest in technology. ADP's products and the technology to support ADP's clients are in need of a serious overhaul. ADP operates as though it is three separate companies, with separate Presidents, separate philosophies, technologies, etc. It's time to integrate, streamline and spend more on R&D; while this will impact Wall Street analysts assessment of ADP in the short term the long term benefits will far outweigh the short term impact.