BI Case Study: ADP Digs into Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing from Scratch

Business Intelligence Journal, Fall 2004 by Hammond, Mark

Nothing couches employees quite like a payroll system, and perhaps no other company touches as many employees as Automatic Data Processing, Inc. There's no doubt of ADP's reach: its chief business unit, Employer Services, automates transactions on payroll, benefits, retirement, taxation, and other human resource functions for some 4/0,000 employers around the world.

Of course, not everything is flawless or perfectly automatic. Some 2,000 customer service associates at Employer Services call centers field more than 10 million client inquiries a year on everything from routine address changes and revised service orders to payroll hiccups and salary snafus.

In business since 1949, ADP, with $7.8 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year, recognizes that resolving client issues swiftly and accurately is crucial to building customer loyalty and maintaining a positive brand image.

For a customer-centric enterprise such as ADP, which handles payroll for about 30 million private-sector employees, the stakes are high and the margin for error slim: One small error can mean one unhappy corporate customerand the risk of lost business and revenue.

To meet service-quality objectives, the Roseland, NJ-based company had equipped agents at its 38 call centers in the U.S. with technology to help manage streams of data and communications-front-office applications for customer and case management, call routing and management, and e-mail processing. But those operational systems introduced a problem of their own-a disjointed set of information silos that made it difficult for ADP client service managers and analysts to assess call-center trends, performance, operations, and areas for improvement across regions and business units. For instance, the system would not allow ADP to view a large national client company as a whole-only by its business with individual regions.

"From a business perspective, there was no cohesive view of the data that bridged all those systems and brought them all together," says John Rubino, project manager of ADP Employer Services Client Service Systems Engineering. "You couldn't get an executive-level snapshot of all the sectors we cater to, and we had no consistent set of service metrics."

A Warehouse Waiting to Happen

In 2000, a handful of IT professionals in the Client Service Systems Engineering unit of ADP Employer Services began exploring how data warehousing and business intelligence could improve customer service by supplying an integrated and analytic view across the disparate call-center systems.

There was just one issue: "We faced a serious learning curve when it came to business intelligence when we started four years ago," says Tony Ranieri, technical architect for what would be called the ORBIT data warehouse. "None of us knew how to design a star schema. We read, we attended conferences, we spoke with vendors, and learned by the seat of our pants."

By summer 2003, a small, five-person team had designed and implemented a sizable analytic environment with only minimal assistance from external data integration consultants. The Online Reporting Business Intelligence Tool (ORBIT) warehouse now contains roughly 250 gigabytes of case, customer, and call-center data, with another 50 gigabytes in eight subject-specific data marts, accessed over the Web by some 600 users.

On the business side, ADP officials report gaining vital insights into call center performance that have enabled them to zero in on problem areas, better manage agents, scheduling, and skills allocation, and identify and share best practices across regions.

Corporate and regional analysts who used to spend 10 hours a week cobbling together Excel reports now accomplish the same task in 30 minutes-a 95 percent reduction that frees resources for other initiatives, they say.

At the same time, ORBIT contributed to improving client retention rates and service quality scores in client surveys, leading to the BI team being recognized by executive management in July 2004 with the ADP Employer Services Presidential Achievement Award.

"It's allowed us to maintain a high level of client satisfaction," said Sterling Norcross, vice president of Employer Services Client Service Systems Engineering. "We can see relationships and patterns we couldn't see before and can respond more quickly."

A Calculated Gamble on Emerging Technology Pays Off

Notably, the ADP BI team made several technology choices that in 2001 and 2002 were widely regarded as unconventional, if not pioneering:

* Broad deployment of a Web-based OLAP front end to 600 business users (versus traditional query and reporting)

* Microsoft SQL Server 2000, then unproven for large scale warehousing

* Nova View, a multidimensional analysis tool Irom then-upstart Panorama Software

ADP reasoned that a Phase 1 multidimensional OLAP implementation would provide the fastest and most valuable comparative insights into such key business questions as call abandonment rates, time to resolution, agent performance, and other metrics across business units and geographies.