Why ADP PayForce sucks – again!
I received a lot of emails from other companies thinking about PayForce after I wrote this humble opinion. Since questions were mostly around specific issues, I decided to elaborate more on this topic and provide some facts. So, here is what I came up with...
ADP Payforce data extraction to SAP
I finally completed all the custom SQL queries to extract data out of ADP Payforce to SAP HCM/Payroll. Historic data was impossible to pull because ADP doesn't have a "from" and "to" range for an action (it's based on "effective date" and "effective sequence"). So, you would either corrupt your historic data by modifying the dates or just load the most current record. I chose the latter.
The whole process was very painful and I had to built a lot of lookup tables to accomodate SAP infotypes. Apparently we are the first company to convert from ADP PayForce to SAP, so there was no help available from anyone. The queries were tested for two properties and they seemed to work, but the real test is coming up this Friday when I extract all employees througho ut the company. The biggest pain was extracting the YTD data out of ADP. It's so different in both systems that I had to write some UNION ALL queries to combine multiple data sets. I strongly suggest to convert in the beginning of the year. Quarter-end conversions are possible, but extracting the YTD details is extremely difficult. Unfortunately, we do not have a choice and have to migrate at the end of this quarter...our implementation partner wasn't ready on Jan 1st.
ADP PayForce to SAP migration
During the last three weeks I have been working on migrating ADP PayForce database to SAP HCM.
Here are some notes:
- Data migration will be easier if you re-create the ADP DB structure for the required tables on your own SQL server. Extracting from ADP can be done through Crystal and you don't want to write and test your queries on extremely slow web-based Crystal. Instead of going through all SAP infotypes and re-creating the whole table structure, go through each infotype separately and create tables as needed.
- SAP requires "From" and "To" range of dates for any master data import. ADP only has an "Effective Date", which means you will not be able to import employee history. You can only get the current data, for which you can specify "12-31-9999" (infinity) as the "To" date. I already thought of many different case scenarios and I ended up concluding that the historic data import is simply impossible, especially with the fact that ADP can have multiple entries on a single day with a logical "Effective Sequence".
- Clean up your data in ADP before importing it into SAP. This is self-explanatory. SAP simply won't accept bad data and you will have to go back and forth, fixing data in ADP first and then re-extracting table data. One-time data change before import into SAP won't work...most probably you will have to run multiple queries against the same data at different points of time (say to upload "Initial Conversion" and then final master data). Also, this is your best time and chance to term all inactive "shadow" employees that have been sitting in PayForce.
- There will be lots of data fields which SAP requires that doesn't exist in ADP; and ADP will have lots of data that SAP doesn't. Cover requirements first, then move on to optional "nice to have" data.
- Do not allow your implementation team to run dual-entries between master data uploads. Master data upload has to happen once, period. Dual entry or entry-tracking will bring a lot of potential issues, especially if your master data gets changed a lot. Provide test data to your development team early, let them test everything on a development server. Once everyone is satisfied with the results, provide a cut-over date after which no data is modified in ADP. That will be your day of re-extraction of all data from ADP.
- Change ADP accounts to read-only so that data is not modified after the extraction process.
I'm sure there is a lot more to this than the above - I will keep updating this page as we go through this painful process.
ADP PayForce is EVIL!
You can hear "PayForce is Evil" and "PayForce is the Devil" from everyone who works with ADP at my work. Seriously, how could ADP create such a crappy product? And they are telling us PayForce will be the future? What kind of future is that? I guess it's a rhetoric question...
I can't believe our company fell for ADP's sales pitch when they pushed PayForce to us four years ago. Back then we were on Ceredian, running payroll by ourselves and distributing checks. Running payroll was somewhat tough and we thought ADP was the solution. Well, we thought wrong.
From continuous downtime issues and buggy upgrades to unacceptable errors and database inconsistencies, we are still in the process of recovering and fixing all employee master data. And we have been doing it for four years now! Can you imagine the frustration level we have throughout the organization? Do you know how much money and energy has been lost trying to get this piece of crap product to work?
Truly, ADP PayForce is a work of art. A wrong kind of art, evil kind of art. The interesting thing is, I tried to Google for PayForce reviews and couldn't find any (from customers that have been using this product). Isn't there anybody else out there that wants to share their love with ADP? Please leave your feedback below :)
