Week 2 Task 5

ADP PayForce

There are many types of databases. One type of database that I am familiar with is an operational database. These databases store detailed data about the operations of an organization. Examples include customer databases that record contact, credit, and demographic information about a business' customers, personnel databases that hold information such as salary, benefits, skills data about employees, Enterprise resource planning that record details about product components, parts inventory, and financial databases that keep track of the organization's money, accounting and financial dealings. [1] The hotel management company that I work for, Dolce Hotels & Resorts, uses many of these databases. We have an accounting database that tracks the 26 hotels financial transactions and we have a centralized human resources and payroll database that holds employee information such as salary, benefits, accrued vacation time, and job codes. For the human resources and payroll database, we use a web-based database called PayForce offered by ADP.

1. “ ADP PayForce is a comprehensive, hosted solution, freeing your company from the never-ending maintenance and upgrade treadmill of replacing outdated or insufficient technology.” [2] While this may seem like a plus, it can also propose many challenges during implementation. Because PayForce is on a shared hosting, accessing your database can be slow since it is located with a lot of other company databases. Another challenge during implementation can be that PayForce is a web-based database. If your internet connection is slow or doesn’t provide enough bandwidth there can be challenges during the implementation.

2. The PayForce database stores every hotels employee data in one centralized location. This creates a competitive advantage in that data can be extracted by using specific parameters for reporting purposes. “With a highly decentralized business, however, HEI lacked a unified system to manage its talent management initiatives and give corporate executives a view of talent across the organization.” [3] HEI Hotels & Resorts is a hotel investment group much like that of Dolce. Having a centralized database like PayForce provides Dolce with a competitive advantage over HEI because our reporting of employee talent information to our corporate executives is streamlined and efficient which can help with retaining top talent.

3. The improvements that I suggest would be an option of having a stand-alone database instead of a hosted database. It may cost more but for large companies it may be beneficial since response time from the database can be slow and data extraction is time consuming.


[1] “Database.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 16 July 2011. Web. 16 July 2011. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database>.

[2] “Payforce Brochure.” ADP Products Demo. Web. 16 July 2011. < http://www.adp.com/tools-and-resources/products-demos-reference-pdfs/~/media/PDF/Product%20Demos/payforce_brochure.ashx>.

[3] “ Fast-Growing Hotel Investment Group Relies on Plateau's SaaS Talent Management Solutions for an Enterprise-Wide View of Talent and Training.” Consumer Electronics Net. 23 February 2011. Web. 16 July 2011. < http://www.consumerelectronicsnet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=1370858&gt;.


The role of ADP PayForce in an organization is integration of Human Resources, benefits and payroll information and processes. This is achieved by integrating data and providing consolidated reporting through ADP. With PayForce as a centralized database for all of these various aspects of information, reports can be written to combine any data necessary for reporting purposes. Its goal is to be an integrated database that seamlessly combines best-in-class payroll functionality with core Hr and benefits information to supply historical, current and future-dated views of employee records and payroll information. PayForce provides paperless payroll which can and has been proven to cut costs. PayForce users are typically payroll processing personnel, Human Resources personnel and accounting or finance department personnel. All of these users can extract information from the database by running reports that suit their individual department needs. Implementation of PayForce requires that all existing employee data be extracted fro the old database and input into PayForce and of course, once PayForce is fully in place, inputting new data into the PayForce database.

1. An Additional Challenge – An additional challenge that lies in implementing PayForce would be the successful extraction of data from the old database on input of this data into PayForce. If the two databases have different formatting of information, the data may not seamlessly go from one database into the other.