Knowing the return on investment (ROI) of your workforce management (WFM) software is important in many ways.

Besides showing the true impact of your investment in the software, it can also encourage key stakeholders to buy into the implementation and understand the value it will bring to your organization.

It’s clear from Legion Workforce Management’s (WFM) demonstrated 13x ROI that implementing WFM software is a transformative step that can revolutionize your profit margins. Besides the financial ROI, Legion WFM maximizes labor efficiency and employee engagement simultaneously.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding the ROI of workforce management (WFM) software is crucial for making strategic investments that drive profitability and long-term growth in today’s competitive business environment.
• Workforce management (WFM) solutions such as Legion can greatly reduce labor costs by automating scheduling, optimizing workforce distribution, and ensuring compliance with labor laws and regulations. These systems enhance business agility, accuracy, and labor efficiency, ultimately resulting in significant savings for businesses.
• Beyond cost savings, WFM software boosts employee satisfaction by improving workflow productivity, offering flexible scheduling options, and promoting work-life balance, ultimately fostering a positive work environment conducive to business success.

The Financial Benefits of Implementing Workforce Management Software

When businesses think about improving their bottom line, workforce management software might not be the first solution that comes to mind. But it should be.

Technology such as Legion Workforce Management can directly impact topline revenue and the bottom line through automation and increased accuracy.

The Power of Intelligent Automation

Legion Workforce Management intelligently automates more than 80 critical workforce management tasks across labor budgeting, demand forecasting, labor optimization, scheduling, time and attendance, compliance management, and more. The following is a breakdown of the savings associated with intelligent automation.

Automating Planning

Planning, budgeting, and forecasting activities are often extremely time-consuming to create, manage, and adapt as conditions change. For example, accurately forecasting business demand and supporting labor needs 12-18 months out can be difficult, especially when the top-down budget is created independently from the operating labor model. Businesses often need help to develop long-range, accurate demand forecasts, project labor hours based on their actual labor model scenarios, or enforce and track labor budgets in weekly schedules.

Imagine if you could automatically marry your staffing model with the labor models used in the stores to create an accurate labor budget that can be enforced in schedules every week—12 to 18 months out. Legion Labor Budgeting enables finance and planning teams to develop accurate long-range plans quickly and easily.

Creating the perfect plan and leveraging intelligent automation to reforecast midweek can free your workforce planning leaders to focus on other strategic activities to grow the business.

Optimized Schedules

Labor costs are often one of an organization’s largest expenses. Legion WFM Software helps you optimize labor efficiency by creating the optimal labor plan.

An optimal labor plan begins with an accurate demand forecast. Legion Demand Forecasting is fully automated and uses mature Machine Learning (ML) to forecast demand by channel, location, and demand driver. It incorporates local events and weather data to create highly accurate demand forecasts. Legion uses AI to provide staffing guidance automatically. Based on demand, the system automatically calculates the labor needed by role in 15-minute, 30-minute, and daily increments and factors in minimum and maximum staffing rules, fixed tasks, and other non-demand labor drivers.

Creating the optimal labor plan helps you make the most of your resources and helps ensure you are properly staffed to meet demand. `

Maximize Manager Productivity

Scheduling and tracking time and attendance are notoriously time-consuming tasks for managers. With Legion, executing schedules and managing timekeeping, which used to take hours, now takes minutes. Legion WFM Software saves approximately 5 hours per week of manager time typically spent on schedule management.

A recent case study also showed that Legion WFM reduced scheduling time by 66% for managers at a national convenience store chain. Managers can quickly match employee skills and preferences with business needs, reducing the time spent creating schedules from hours to minutes. Automation streamlines the scheduling process, slashing the required time and minimizing mistakes. It also ensures that your workforce numbers align with your operational necessities.

Once employees are scheduled, tracking time becomes even simpler. Features like timesheet auto-approvals and schedule-to-clock exception alerts help managers save time and effort while ensuring compliance.

What can your managers do with all of that extra time? How about spending more time with customers and upskilling associates to help increase sales

For example, one large retail store implemented the Legion WFM Platform and saw a 22% increase in sales, simply because their managers had more time to work with customers.

These numbers tell the story of the actual ROI you can experience.

Increased Accuracy Reduces Costs

Whether it is more accurate forecasts, labor plans, schedules, or timecards, accuracy can be a significant area of savings for most businesses. Labor plans that miss that mark can result in significant over or understaffing. When it comes to payroll, inaccurate timecards can be costly in terms of compliance risk, unplanned overtime, or payroll inflation. A few areas of benefit include:

1. Reduced Payroll Errors: Accurate time tracking ensures that employees are paid precisely for their work time. This minimizes overpayments and underpayments, which can otherwise lead to financial losses and require time-consuming corrections.
2. Increased Productivity: Accurate and well-managed schedules help ensure the right employees work at the right times, optimizing workloads and improving overall productivity. This can lead to faster tasks and project completion, directly impacting revenue and profitability.
3. Enhanced Compliance: Accurate scheduling and timekeeping help businesses comply with labor laws and regulations, such as those concerning overtime, minimum wage, and breaks. This reduces the risk of costly legal issues, fines, and penalties.

Reduced Compliance Costs

Labor costs are often one of an organization’s largest expenses. Legion WFM Software can help you save money on staffing in several ways.

Intelligently automated scheduling and time and attendance reduce risks and penalties associated with non-compliance with labor laws and regulations. Our system will alert you to potential problems using preloaded compliance templates and create schedules that automatically adhere to your set regulations.

For situations requiring premium pay, you won’t have to worry about manually tracking schedule changes as they are tracked for you.

Before using Legion WFM, one quick-service restaurant always paid workers premium wages to avoid non-compliance, even when that pay wasn’t required. This method was easier and cheaper than manually tracking when they needed to pay premium wages.

After adopting Legion WFM, this company quickly realized massive savings.

Legion does the work to track and implement premium pay automatically, so you don’t spend money on unnecessary higher wages or penalties from unintentional labor law violations.

Managers won’t have to worry about accidentally missing (or misinterpreting) a rule, and owners won’t worry about incurring thousands or even millions of dollars in penalties.

Enhanced Employee Engagement

Another way to significantly boost your profit margins is to focus on workflow productivity and staff engagement. These elements are deeply interconnected, and improvements in one area often lead to gains in the other.

Using Legion’s advanced technologies, companies can create adaptable schedules that align with operational and staff needs.

Flexible scheduling is one of the most important factors for hourly employees and is key to keeping them happy. Employees are more engaged when schedules meet employee availability and preferences, and costly absenteeism decreases. Gallup recently found that highly engaged business units realize an 81% difference in absenteeism and a 14% difference in productivity. Even better, highly engaged business units and employees result in a 23% difference in profitability.

Providing flexible payment methods like Legion InstantPay, can also unlock ROI while enabling employees to access their earned wages when convenient. In addition to supporting employees’ financial well-being, businesses see increased clock hygiene as employees are encouraged to clock in and out immediately before and after their shifts. Retro pay adjustments can be eliminated, greatly reducing the number of “look back” checks and transactions, and open shift uptake is increased.

ALDO Group, a Legion customer, observed that employees using InstantPay had 72% better clock-in performance than non-users. This led to fewer incomplete timecards, reduced time spent managing timecards, and enhanced accuracy.

Why do these factors matter? Better work-life balance and financial stability will reduce stress and prevent burnout. Happy employees are less likely to leave so you can keep your best performers on board.

The Legion WFM Platform has been shown to reduce turnover by 5%, saving large corporations millions over three years by avoiding attrition.

Investing in workforce management solutions isn’t just about cutting costs; it’s about creating an environment where the business and its people can thrive together.

The Bottom Line: WFM Software is Worth the Investment

Solutions like Legion WFM are undoubtedly significant investments, and we would never recommend that you spend money on new tech just for the sake of it.

This is about selecting the most innovative option that will yield substantial benefits in the long run for your business. With a 13x ROI, choosing Legion is a safe bet. You are investing in the future of your business. Aside from the clear financial gains, you’re also cultivating the happiness of your team, from leadership to hourly staff—the drivers of your business.

To learn more about the many ways Legion can help you cut down on costs, increase sales, and boost worker happiness, schedule a demo today.