ELMO Software delivered 129% ROI: Forrester Study Confirms

Of course, you can only depend on ROI claims when they’re backed by real data and a thorough justification. Whether you’re in HR justifying an HRIS investment or in Finance evaluating a proposal, ROI will be a critical metric that plays a pivotal role in decision making. 

ELMO Software commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to quantify the financial value of our platform in practical terms.

To illustrate value, the TEI study focused on the example of a representative organisation, built by interviewing real ELMO customers. 

In this case, the organisation is an Australian healthcare provider with 500 employees and a seven-person full-time HR team. The organisations interviewed were facing common challenges before ELMO, including manual processes, inefficient recruitment, time-consuming training course development and rollout and disconnected systems leading to scattered data and ineffective reporting.

With ELMO in place, the benefits soon became clear:

• 129% ROI
• $685K in net present value (NPV)
• Payback in under six months

Let’s dig a little deeper into the details and explore how those figures came to life.

Less paperwork, more strategic impact

($122,000 in value over three years)

Manual HR tasks like updating records, approving leave and chasing signatures don’t just take huge bites out of your time, they also drag down productivity. By automating these workflows, ELMO HR Core helped save over 2,000 hours a year, which has the dual benefit of time savings and enabling HR teams to focus on higher-impact work. That’s a combined quantifiable value of $122,000 over three years.

“Within our coordination and administration (roles), we have been able to reduce the admin so that our people can now get involved in more higher value activities.” – Group Manager of People and Culture, Manufacturing.

Cut hiring time by 70%

($38,000 in value over three years)

Delays in recruitment are a notable resource drain and cost more than time, they can also slow down business momentum. With ELMO’s Recruitment module, hiring managers were found to have reduced hiring related admin by 70%, including time spent juggling job ads, shortlists and contract generation. An effective early screening process also improved the quality of the shortlisted applicants, diverting attention to serious contenders. Overall this helped them make swifter decisions and fill roles sooner. Over three years, the overall recruitment efficiency and productivity gains added up to $38,000.

“It would take probably [an estimate of] of a ten business day turnaround to have a position recruitment approved. Now, with ELMO, we can see requisitions approved within three days.” – Executive General Manager of People and Culture, Healthcare and Social Assistance.

Faster rollout of modern learning

($772,000 in value over three years)

Prior to ELMO, developing and delivering training used to involve weeks of prep, manual content creation, and limited visibility over completion (often linked to compliance). With ELMO’s Learning Management System (LMS), training can now be rolled out faster and be tailored to organisational needs without significant overhead. Employees complete training 50% faster, while HR saves time and cost on course development. Combined, these efficiencies were worth $772,000 over three years.

“We were able to demonstrate the compliance of our staff qualifications remotely [using data extracted from ELMO], versus travelling in-person to the audited site and providing paperwork documentation.” –Executive General Manager of People and Culture, Healthcare and Social Assistance.

Reporting time slashed to focus on strategy 

($14,000 in value over three years)

Reporting doesn’t need to be a time sink. Before ELMO, creating reports involved hours of data extraction and manual spreadsheet manipulation. Now, HR teams use ELMO’s Analytics module to build centralised dashboards, generating insights in minutes, not days. With greater speed, better visibility into applicant profiles, onboarding progress and compliance rates, the results are clear and valued by both finance and executive teams. That time saved is calculated to be worth $14,000 over three years.

“We didn’t have any reporting before because everything was manual. The only data we had was out of our payroll system.” – Group People and Culture Manager, Healthcare and Social Assistance.

Employee self-service leads to fewer interruptions

($268,000 in value over three years)

Every time an employee requests a payslip or leave, or updates their details through HR, that’s time lost for both sides. With ELMO, these everyday tasks are now self-serviced, taking minutes instead of the hours that were once lost in back-and-forth emails. Across the organisation, that added up to $268,000 in savings.

“It’s good to have everything in one system so employees can look at all their info on one system with one login rather than going to separate ones.” – Director of People and Community, Arts and Recreation.

What’s the ROI?

So how does this all stack up in terms of ELMO’s ROI? Across HR admin, recruitment, training and learning, reporting, and day-to-day tasks, the impact is significant. This isn’t just about HR efficiency, it’s about business-wide value that flows through to all levels of the organisation and frees up teams to focus on the work that drives strategy, culture, and growth.

The Forrester TEI study demonstrates that ELMO’s platform didn’t just pay for itself in under six months, it delivered a 129% ROI and $685K in net present value over three years. Those kinds of results speak for themselves.

How was this calculated? For transparency and the chance to look closer at the figures, including ROI, NVP and payback period, please see the following Benefits and Costs chart.