Infor has announced that it is strengthening its HCM solution with integrations to ADP solutions. Infor will initially integrate the ADP SmartCompliance and ADP Health Compliance solutions to its HCM solution to improve compliance. The announcement comes a week after Inforum and it is perhaps surprising that it was not announced there.
Infor are by no means the first ERP vendor to turn to ADP for this expertise. Workday, Oracle and SAP all have integrations to ADP. FinancialForce is in the process of integrating its ERP solution with ADP HCM. The functionality that ADP will bring is for processes like employment tax, wage payments, wage garnishments, tax credits, employment verification, and unemployment claims.
Compliance focused
The relationship focuses on improving the compliance of Infor’s US HCM customers. The intention is to provide improvements in compliance for those customers through improving processes around tax filings. In turn, this should reduce the risk of filing incorrect returns. It is interesting that Infor has chosen to integrate with ADP rather than develop the functionality within its own payroll or HCM solutions.
The integration not only benefits HCM customers but also those using Infor Payroll. These improvements will include Form W-2 management, wage garnishments, and unemployment claims administration.
The integration with ADP Health Compliance will allow companies to improve their processes around the requirements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This strengthens the Infor solutions in that market segment as it looks to expand its reach. Infor announced that Koch would implement its solution across 130,000 employees at Inforum. This is one of the largest implementations to date. One wonders whether this announcement is as a result of the analysis undertaken in that project.
Trish McFarlane, Vice President, Infor HCM commented: “Infor is committed to evolving its applications as changing industry dynamics create new challenges, and working with industry leaders, such as ADP, will allow us to keep our customers competitive and agile. In such an unpredictable business environment, growing organizations need solutions that work, and work well, while still being useful, flexible, and powerful. As a business evolves, it needs a wider range of capabilities, without adding unnecessary maintenance, deployment time, and cost – which is exactly what Infor delivers with its power cloud-based applications and strategic partnerships.”
What does it mean
VP, Global HCM Strategy and Product Management at Infor
For Infor this is one area that they have clearly decided to cut development investment in. This is a wise decision. ADP are rapidly becoming the go to partner for global payroll services. Their recent announcements have seen them capturing partnerships that could see them start to dominate the global payroll market. What will be interesting is whether this partnership is strengthened. Will it become a more strategic alliance between the two companies. This could see ADP as the preferred payroll partner of choice for Infor. Outside those regions that Infor Payroll is developed for such as North America and the Middle East.
Doug Politi, President of Added Value Services at ADP commented: “We are delighted to enhance our successful working relationship with Infor. We already share many clients with Infor, so formalizing our collaboration makes sense. The value that ADP can bring to mutual clients in the areas of health compliance, wage garnishments, and tax credits – to name a few – may help them be more efficient and accurate, and may relieve the administrative burden in these areas so that they can focus on driving business success.”
