Tech & Innovation Blog

Video: AWS

[JACK] Having spent more than 30 years in the tech industry working on analytics in the cloud,

[JACK] I was drawn to ADP because of its mission.

[JACK] It’s a mission that’s aligned to my core values.

[JACK] Those values about helping people improve their lives by unlocking the power of data.

[JACK] But before I tell you how we do that, we need to start at the beginning.

[JACK] ADP started in 1949 in New Jersey, helping businesses pay their employees.

[JACK] From its early days, the company has always been focused on invention and innovation.

[JACK] We’ve had a proud history of a lot of great products and great firsts, fast forward to today, we’re the largest provider of human resource software and services.

[JACK] So, what does that mean in terms of the size and scale of our business?

[JACK] Well, those numbers are pretty impressive. We have over 920,000 clients doing business in over 140 countries.

[JACK] Our technology powers, payroll processing, tax payments, job applications, timesheets.

[JACK] That means a lot of data, and a lot of money is moving through our systems on a daily basis.

[JACK] In fact, we move over $2.3 trillion a year.

[JACK] This is the money that’s used to pay you, pay me, and to submit our taxes, and to put money into our retirement funds.

[JACK] Now, the issue with $2.3 trillion is a massive number.

[JACK] And for me, it’s a hard number to understand.

[JACK] So, I thought about it a little bit, and I said, how can I conceive of that?

[JACK] Well, what if it was GDP?

[JACK] It’s not GDP. But if it was GDP, how big would that number be?

[JACK] So, we kind of took a look at it.

[GRAPH] Comparison charts of GDPs in other countries.

[JACK] Here’s the top ten GDPs.

And if that $2.3 trillion was a GDP, ADP would land somewhere between France and Italy.

[JACK] So, all of that data, all of this information gives us a unique perspective on the world of work.

[JACK] In fact, every month we issue a report in the public interest called The National Employment Report, came out just this morning.

[JACK] And so, as you can see, we deal with all this data,

[JACK] It takes a special ability for us to be able to scale and manage it.

[JACK] We started our journey to the AWS cloud for this data in mid 2019, and we did it for three important reasons.

[JACK] One, so that we could tap the new capabilities.

[JACK] Second, so that we could get elasticity in the cloud.

[JACK] And third, it really has helped us create a data driven culture, so that we are more reactive, more understanding about what’s going on in the world.

[JACK] Today, we’re processing over two and a half petabytes of data with over 25 billion individual data points represented, and that’s boiling down to 312 trillion decisions a month being taken by our analytics and machine learning processes.

[JACK] Our team is at the very heart of that treasure trove of data.

[JACK] We build data analytics products, including the ADP DataCloud, which provides people analytics and HR benchmarking to help companies measure, compare, predict, and understand their workforce and support them.

[JACK] This allows them to see trends, allows them to see if the programs and policies that they’ve put in place are effective.

[JACK] Everything you’re seeing here is calculated on AWS using a full range of data analytics and machine learning capabilities.

[JACK] We use Amazon Sage Maker for our machine learning, Amazon EMR, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Neptune to perform aspects of our overall data processing.

[JACK] These capabilities have enabled us to keep innovating on behalf of our clients, and one way we’re doing this is to help them with some pressing needs in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion across their workforce.

[JACK] That’s why my team developed the new Diversity Equity Inclusion dashboards that we launched earlier this year.

[JACK] It helps a company baseline and understand their diversity program and not only internally, but for the first time in the industry, to be able to compare themselves to other companies, not just other companies in their location, but also other companies in their industry, and by company size.

[JACK] And this baseline information allows them to see whether or not their programs are having a positive and beneficial impact on the diversity programs that they’ve put in place.

[JACK] We still have issues, though, to address in terms of pay equity, but before we get into that, let’s step back and take a look at what’s happened in the US employment market over the past 20 months.

[JACK] What I’m showing you here is data from ADP that shows you what happened in the total US employment over those past 20 months.

[JACK] You can see when the COVID crisis began.

[GRAPH] Total US Employment Rate Change

[JACK] Unfortunately, there were differences in terms of the types and genders of people losing work.

[JACK] In fact, what you can see is, yes, a lot of people lost their jobs. Those jobs are coming back, but men actually fared a lot better than women during the pandemic.

[JACK] Certain industries were affected a lot more as well, hospitality, manufacturing, retail; areas that have not yet made full recoveries.

[JACK] If we look at pay, you can see, though, that the gap between men’s pay and women’s pay is not where we all want it to be, but it seems to be level over time.

[JACK] However, these numbers are a little bit misleading, because if we add back in those jobs that women lost at a larger extent in those industries from hospitality, transportation, the pay gap is actually getting worse.

[JACK] In fact, my associates at the ADP Research Institute tell me that 20 years of progress for women have been lost in terms of pay equity gaps over the pandemic.

[JACK] But collectively, we have an opportunity to improve that.

[JACK] So how do we do that?

[JACK] Well, our team has also recently built and launched a new capability called The Pay Equity Storyboard.

[TEXT] Pay Equity Storyboard

[JACK] It’s a set of insights and tools and explanations and visualizations that allow companies to understand the pay equity issues that they have and to do plans and to make changes proactively, taking insights straight to action to correct pay gaps.

[JACK] Now we released this just a few months ago at the beginning of the summer.

[JACK] So, on just a few months of data, we’re starting to see some pretty incredible reactions.

[JACK] About 1000 clients have started to use the pay equity storyboard, 65% of them showing pay equity improvement.

[TEXT] Improving Pay Equity

1,000+ clients using the storyboard

65% showing improvements in pay equity

$1.1 M average impact

$728 M returned to communities

[JACK] On average, per client, they’ve made a $1.1 million impact, that’s over $720,000,000 returned to communities.

[JACK] This is about people, individual people, and for an individual person that’s equated to about three $500 for 210,000 people and for workers whose industries are hit hardest by the pandemic.

[JACK] This is meaningful money.

[JACK] This could mean making a need of car repair. It could mean enabling children to participate in extracurricular activities, or simply saving money for a rainy day.

[JACK] At ADP, we’re always designing for people and data informs how we do that.

[JACK] At the end of the day, all of our data and everything we do starts with them and you and I, and tens and hundreds and thousands of people.

[JACK] Now is the time to use data to help people, to understand what actions we can take, to create a more diverse, more equitable and a more inclusive work environment and to build the future we all want to create.

[LOGO] ADP, Always Designing for People.

[JACK] Thank you.