Modus Make-a-Thon - ADP Marketplace

Every quarter we take a break from client work and spend a Friday afternoon exploring product ideas and learning new technologies as part of our labs program.

We call these make-a-thons and last quarter we decided to include our client ADP, an HR and payroll provider, in the fun. For our theme we chose the ADP marketplace — a platform based around an API that allows developers to build apps to plug into employee data and the ADP ecosystem of over 600,000 employers (we actually helped design the website).

We split up into nice teams and challenged them to come up with creative new solutions that could help employers solve problems leveraging the ADP marketplace as part of our “Race to The Marketplace” make-a-thon. (For fun, each team was named after a famous race horse).

We voted on the results, and the top three ideas were then presented to a panel of experts at ADP to choose the winningest concept. The teams and their concepts were (initial winners bolded with links to their presentations):

• Mayday — an alert system to connect to employees in a crisis (Secretariat)
• Mission Giving — a platform for employees to give to the causes that they care about and company matching integrated with payroll (War Admiral)
• eQua — a dashboard and analytics tool for equitable pay (Lucky Strike)
• Chat for Charity — matches employees for short social engagements with confirmed meetings prompting charitable donations (Waikikamukau)
• Workplace Scavenger Hunt — an AR game that helps new hires familiarize themselves with the workplace through a scavenger hunt (Go For Gin)
• Know Me — gamification of data entry for employee skill and profile data (Dark Star)
• Eagle’s Eye — lightweight employee peer feedback with a machine learning layer (Macanudo)
• eMployee√ — automated reference checking for new hires (Pink Star)
• Skillator — internal and external sourcing of project candidates based on skills (Sir Barton)

The ADP judges appreciated all of the work and being part of the process but in the final stretch War Admiral edged out Secretariat by a nose. We all had a lot of fun and love thinking about innovative solutions — especially those that build value for our clients.

Congrats to the winners and special thanks to the judges from ADP:

• Ari Osur (VP of Marketing, ADP Ventures)
• Mike Romeo (Sr. Director of Web Marketing)
• Carl Lorentzen (Manager, Web Marketing)

A few moments from the day: