ADP Bi-Directional Connector

The ClearCompany / ADP Workforce Now Bi-Directional Connector integrates two human resources information systems to ensure that employee and organizational data is always up to date through hourly data syncs. The Connector also establishes ADP as the system of record, or "source of truth," for employee data. This work focused on the Connector setup experience for new ClearCompany customers with existing ADP Workforce Now accounts.

This project was surprisingly complex because the two systems serve different purposes within an organization. ADP is primarily a payroll system, and employee data is structured around that idea. ClearCompany is a talent management platform, and employee data is structured around supervisory relationships and the allocation of responsibilities within the organization. An example of how this difference might play out is how an employee's department is captured in each system. In ADP, an employee's department might actually describe a cost center or other accounting/administrative concept. In ClearCompany, employee departments capture the specialized functional groups within the organization (i.e., the more "traditional" sense of a department). Another complexity results from different data requirements between the two systems. ClearCompany requires each employee to have a department, office, and email address, while ADP has no such requirements.

Problem

  • HR Admins must manage employee records and organizational data across multiple systems
  • What would seem like relatively simple changes to employee data create a surprising amount of system work
  • In practice, employee and organizational data are not well-maintained

Research

Before design efforts began in earnest, the Product and UX team set out to better understand how our customers use Workforce Now. Because of an existing integration with ADP, we were able to access ADP data for a small set of customers. This provided an initial glimpse into what our customers might encounter when attempting to integrate the two systems. The team also conducted a simple survey to understand how our customers were using ADP and how their ADP data mapped to their ClearCompany data, particularly with respect to a few key data fields which are required for ClearCompany user records. This research phase was critical to understanding the context(s) in which customers would be completing the Bi-Directional Connector setup process.

Key findings included:

  • Many customers had duplicated, outdated, or other types of "junk data" in their ADP Workforce Now accounts.
  • ADP provides a variety of data fields, and customers use those fields in a  variety of ways (e.g., some customers used the ADP 'Business Unit' field to capture office locations, while others used the ADP 'Location' field for that type of data). Some customers used a single data field to capture multiple pieces of information (e.g., an office named "Boston - 00012135" with no clear indicator of the meaning of the numbers).
  • There were not always clear mappings between customers' ADP data and ClearCompany data. However, there tended to be a greater level of agreement between the ClearCompany required fields and their ADP equivalents. For example, ADP job title was typically equivalent to ClearCompany role.

Design

For the first phase of the Bi-Directional Connector project, we focused on new ClearCompany customers with existing ADP WorkforceNow accounts. Therefore, the primary goal of setup would be to import ADP employees and supporting organizational structures (i.e., offices, departments) into ClearCompany. Because the two systems have different data requirements for employees (e.g., ClearCompany requires all employees to have an office and department, while ADP does not), we initially envisioned a model in which ClearCompany would provide a "missing data report," and the HR admin would use that report to fill out missing values in ADP. Although it was not an explicit goal at the time, this model could be described as a "strict" system of record model in hindsight. This model would require customers to bring any data that exists in ADP into ClearCompany, and the only other option would be to remove or edit ADP data prior to completing the setup. In this model, setup pages were primarily informational as opposed to interactive.

Initial stakeholder feedback indicated that this model was too restrictive and asked customers to do too much work, which could prevent adoption of the connector.

For the final designs, we re-focused on two primary design goals for the effort:

  • Allow flexibility so customers can exclude the junk, and provide the supporting information necessary to make those decisions
  • Provide clarity about the setup process, to promote customer confidence that the integration will work properly

The image below shows a sample screen from our final design. In this example, the customer must review the set of ClearCompany roles that will be created based on their ADP job titles. We provide a clear indication of the number of roles that will be created, as well as a simple "tile" representation of each ADP job title. We use these tiles throughout the setup to represent that various ADP data entities that are pulled into ClearCompany. This setup process leverages an exclusion model — by default, all ADP job titles result in the creation of a new ClearCompany role, but any number of job titles can be manually excluded. To support customer decision-making around inclusion/exclusion, we provide relevant metadata about each ADP data entity, including the number of employees associated with that entity, the ADP numerical code associated with the entity, and whether there are any other entities with a duplicate name. As entities are excluded, the count updates to reflect the total number of roles that will be created in ClearCompany.

We also provided the option to exclude entire categories of ADP data from ClearCompany. In other words, if a customer's ADP job titles do not map neatly onto the concept of roles within ClearCompany, the customer could opt out of using ADP as the system of record for ClearCompany roles, and ClearCompany would ignore ADP job titles when syncing data between the two systems.

Outcome

We initially expected that our Implementation Managers would need to support customers in understanding and completing the Connector setup process. However, once the Connector became available for purchase on the ADP Marketplace, there were a few customers who finished setup before we were able to coordinate with them. Customers were able to successfully understand and complete the setup without any assistance, and we even heard a customer report that this integration was much better than other integrations she had used in the past. The Connector is currently available on the ADP Marketplace.