ELMO Software Saved 23K Hours Annually: Forrester Study Reveals How

To investigate this further, ELMO Software recently commissioned a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study from Forrester Consulting. The aim was to measure the real value of ELMO, looking specifically at factors like ROI and time savings.

The TEI study used the example of an Australian healthcare organisation, a representative organisation of real ELMO customer data. The representative ELMO customer example has 500 employees and a seven-person HR team and found that they could reclaim over 23,700 hours every year. 

Let’s see how those hours and numbers stack up.

Reduced HR admin overload

(2,184 hours saved per year)

Before ELMO, HR teams spent hours every week on manual tasks like managing leave, updating employee records and chasing approvals. With ELMO’s HR Core module, they have a central platform for people management and self-service, creating a single source of truth for employee data that enables more efficient workforce planning and reporting.

The TEI study found that this kind of efficiency equates to about six hours saved per HR team member every week, or 2,184 hours a year.

“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 or tasks going on in the team.” – Group Manager of People and Culture, Manufacturing.

Sped up recruitment

(672 hours saved per year)

Before ELMO, hiring managers wasted hours on manual tasks like posting jobs, reviewing resumes and coordinating interviews. ELMO’s Recruitment module changed all that by providing job board integration, an applicant tracking system (ATS) and digital contract creation, removing the bulk of recruitment legwork.

Managing potential job candidates now takes 70% less time, freeing up over 670 hours a year.

“It would take probably [an estimate of] a 10 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.

Streamlined training

(15,270 hours saved per year)

The rapid development and rollout of Training & Development courses is where we saw the biggest time savings. The study found that,

• 480 hours per year saved on training material development.
• 14,790 hours per year were saved on training completion.

With ELMO’s Learning Management System (LMS), staff can access pre-built courses that can easily be tailored for specific needs. These can then be delivered quickly and completed easily via any device. 

By delivering personalised learning plans via an intuitive and user-friendly interface, employees were able to complete their training 50% faster. With an LMS, everything is tracked in one place, which carries the added benefit of making compliance much easier and more visible.

“There are some good savings in time and the course builder is very user friendly.” – Group Manager of People and Culture, Healthcare and Social Assistance.

Simplified reporting

(250 hours saved per year)

Reporting used to mean digging through spreadsheets and manually preparing updates for the executive or leadership teams, a process that’s not only long winded, but also potentially error prone. With ELMO Analytics, dashboards are centralised and reports can be created in minutes instead of hours.

“We didn’t have any reporting before because everything was manual. The only data we had was out of our payroll system and then we would manually manipulate that data to create [slide decks] and graphs.” – Group Manager of People and Culture, Healthcare and Social Assistance.

Self-service empowered employees

(5,324 hours saved per year)

Seemingly simple and routine requests from employees, such as payslips or leave requests, can clog up HR inboxes. 

Now, however, employees can use self-service tools to handle these tasks. ELMO’s self-service portal dramatically reduces employee requests to HR and Finance and has the added bonus effect of improving the employee experience and granting more independence.

“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 bigger picture?

Together, these changes paint a pretty dramatic picture, adding up to a significant 23,700 hours saved per year. And the benefits don’t stop there, we also looked into Return on Investment. The Forrester study found that ELMO delivered:

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

It’s pretty clear that for HR teams under the pump, this kind of impact makes a real and calculable difference by turning time spent on admin into time spent on strategy and culture.

“We see ELMO as a fifth member in our team. We’re able to get to market a lot quicker than we could previously due to a number of roadblocks in terms of administration processes which are now all streamlined into a system.” – Executive General Manager of People and Culture, Healthcare and Social Assistance.

So there we have it, if your HR team is stretched, there’s a smarter way forward with the right software and ELMO can help you get there.