Our organization is evaluating cloud migration for ADP Workforce Now 2022.2, and I’m specifically concerned about succession planning capabilities. We’ve built extensive custom workflows in our on-premise deployment that handle multi-level approval chains, custom competency matrices, and automated development plan generation.
From the feature matrix documentation, it appears cloud deployment has some limitations around custom workflow complexity and certain API endpoints. I’m particularly worried about losing functionality that our executive team relies on daily. Has anyone gone through this migration and can share insights on feature gaps they encountered? What aspects of succession planning work well in cloud versus what required workarounds or remains unavailable?
I’ll share our practical experience. Custom workflow migration was our biggest pain point, but we discovered that cloud’s native workflow builder actually handles 80% of what we custom-coded on-premise. The remaining 20% required process changes rather than technical workarounds. For succession planning specifically, the multi-level approval limitation forced us to consolidate some redundant approval steps we’d accumulated over years - turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Executive feedback was that the streamlined process was actually more efficient.
The automated development plan generation is where we struggled most. On-premise had robust custom scripting capabilities that cloud doesn’t fully replicate. We ended up using the cloud workflow engine with some creative workarounds, but it required rethinking our entire approach. The positive side - cloud’s reporting and analytics for succession planning are significantly improved. We can now generate executive readiness dashboards that were nearly impossible on-premise. It’s a trade-off between customization depth and modern analytics capabilities.
Feature matrix comparison is critical before committing to migration. Request a detailed gap analysis from ADP showing exactly which APIs and workflow features aren’t available in cloud. In our case, three custom integrations we built on-premise had no cloud equivalent. We had to wait for ADP’s roadmap to catch up, which took 10 months. The cloud roadmap is aggressive though - they’re adding features quarterly that close the gap.