Making the Case
You have seen what ErgoSphere does. The harder part is often getting it approved. This page is written for that conversation, so you can take the argument to your manager, your finance team or your procurement group without having to build it yourself. Print it, edit it, or lift the numbers into your own paper.
That is the whole commercial question. Will the platform save a practitioner more than 45 minutes a week?
The Question You Will Actually Be Asked
The business case is not for buying another software tool. It is for reducing the cost of delivering Human Factors work.
The question is rarely whether the software is good. It is: what do we get back for the licence cost, and what does it cost us to carry on as we are.
Both of those are answerable, and the second one matters more than most business cases admit.
By consolidating assessment methods and project activities into a single environment, ErgoSphere reduces practitioner administration, duplicated data entry, reporting effort, rework and reliance on individually maintained tools. So the investment should be assessed against the amount of practitioner capacity and external expenditure it can save or redirect each year. That case can be validated with conservative estimates of your current Human Factors workload, comparing the resulting annual benefit with the licence cost. The rest of this page does exactly that.
Start With an Hourly Rate
Contract Human Factors practitioners in Australia start at around $150 an hour. A fully loaded internal practitioner usually costs more than that once overheads, tooling and non-billable time are counted, so $150 is a conservative floor rather than a typical figure.
At $150 an hour:
- A full ErgoSphere seat at $4,900 a year is about 33 hours of practitioner time.
- Spread across a 46-week working year, that is roughly 45 minutes a week.
- At the Founding Cohort rate of $3,675 a year it is about 25 hours, or roughly half an hour a week on the same basis.
So the whole commercial question reduces to this: over a year, will the platform save a practitioner more than 45 minutes a week? If it will, the licence has paid for itself and everything after that is capacity you did not have before.
Where the Hours Come From
Three places, in rough order of size.
Report production Largest
Assembling a Human Factors report by hand means exporting results, formatting tables, chasing figure numbering, rebuilding the document when an input changes, and proofreading the assembly rather than the analysis. ErgoSphere generates the Word document, which removes most of that, and removes it again every time the report is revised.
Assessment setup and data entry Second
Building the spreadsheet, re-entering task steps, copying system and role details between methods, and checking that the copies still agree.
Duplication and rework across related assessments Third
When several methods look at the same task or system, the same information gets recreated in each one. When the task changes, it gets recreated again, and the versions drift. Shared project data removes the second entry and the reconciliation that follows it.
A Worked Example
Illustrative onlyOne practitioner, 20 assessments a year, 12 formal reports a year, at $150 an hour. These are illustrative figures, not a forecast. Substitute your own.
| Where the time goes | Hours saved a year | Basis | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Report production and formatting | 36 | 3 hours across 12 reports | $5,400 |
| Assessment setup and data entry | 20 | 1 hour across 20 assessments | $3,000 |
| Re-entry and rework across related assessments | 10 | across the year | $1,500 |
| Total value | 66 | $9,900 | |
| Annual licence, one seat | ($4,900) | ||
| Net annual benefit | $5,000 |
At the Founding Cohort rate of $3,675, the net annual benefit on the same illustrative assumptions is $6,225.
The break-even test
The licence pays for itself at 33 hours a year. The example above claims 66. That means half of this estimate could be wrong and the purchase would still stand up. That is usually the more persuasive number to put in front of a finance manager, because it does not ask them to believe the optimistic case.
Capability That Stays
A method that lives in one senior practitioner's head is a single point of failure. A method that lives in the tool is not.
The worked example counts hours. It does not count what happens to a team's capability, because that does not fit in a spreadsheet cell. It is still real money.
In most Human Factors teams the methods live with people. The senior practitioner knows how to run the analysis properly, which scoring table applies, and what a defensible report looks like. Juniors learn by sitting beside them, when there is time, which there usually is not. When that person is promoted, moves on or retires, the method goes with them, and the team is back to relearning it from the literature or buying the capability in from outside.
ErgoSphere puts the method in the tool. Each one carries its own guide: what it is, when to use it, how to run it, and the source literature it came from. The scoring tables are the published tables. A junior practitioner running an assessment for the first time is taken through the same steps the senior would have used, and produces a report in the same structure. Three things follow.
- The skill stays with the organisation, not with an individual. The team's capability no longer depends on who is in the room, and it does not walk out the door with the one person who held it.
- Juniors develop faster and cost less to develop. They learn a method by running it, in the tool, against the published source, instead of waiting for a senior's spare hour. Seniors review the work rather than teach it from scratch.
- The quality of the work goes up and stops varying. Every practitioner runs the same method the same way, so the output does not depend on who happened to do it, and reviewers are checking the analysis rather than the method.
If you want a figure for this in the business case, use the last time you replaced a senior practitioner, or the last time you bought a method in from a consultancy because nobody in-house could run it. Either number is usually larger than the licence. There is a line for it in the worksheet below.
Your Numbers
Fill this in with figures your organisation will recognise. The totals work themselves out as you type, and they print with the page. Nothing you enter leaves this browser.
Reviewers Do Not Need a Licence
A common mistake in costing a tool like this is to count every person who touches the work.
ErgoSphere licences the practitioners who do the analysis. Reviewers, engineers, safety leads and clients who need to read, check and comment on the output use the free ErgoSphere Viewer. So a project team of ten with two Human Factors practitioners needs two seats, not ten. Check that your cost model reflects that before it goes up the chain.
project team
practitioners
What It Costs to Do Nothing
The alternative to buying the software is not zero cost. It is the current cost, which is real but invisible because it sits inside salaries and project budgets rather than on a purchase order.
Carrying on as you are means continuing to pay for:
- practitioner time spent formatting rather than analysing
- spreadsheet and template maintenance, usually by the person least able to spare the time
- re-entering the same information into several methods
- reconciling versions that have drifted apart
- rework when a task or system description changes late
- onboarding new practitioners into locally invented processes
- capability that leaves with the one senior practitioner who held it
- external support bought in when internal capacity runs out
- work you cannot take on because the current way of working does not scale
The comparison that matters is not software cost against nothing. It is software cost against the ongoing cost of the current way of delivering the work.
Every item on that list is a file in a folder. Here is that folder, twelve weeks into a project, and the same project as one file.
What Your IT and Security Team Will Ask
- It runs locally on the practitioner's machine. Project data stays on that machine. No cloud account, no server to stand up, no analytics.
- It works on disconnected machines. An offline activation removes even the routine licence check, which matters for defence and rail.
- It is distributed as an MSIX package, signed with a DigiCert Extended Validation certificate issued to Ergonomics Engineered Pty Ltd.
- A project is a single file, so it can be stored, backed up and controlled using whatever document management your organisation already uses.
What Procurement Will Need
- Per-seat, annual licence. $4,900 AUD a seat a year at the published rate. No per-module pricing and no procurement-only gate.
- Australian company, invoiced in Australian dollars.
- Founding Cohort: 25% off for years one and two, $3,675 a seat a year, by application while the cohort remains open. First 50 seats, five per organisation, reverting to the published rate in year three.
- Company registration: Ergonomics Engineered Pty Ltd · ACN 693 121 845 · ABN 44 693 121 845.
- Current pricing and terms: see the pricing page. To ask a question or arrange a trial: contact us.
One Paragraph You Can Paste Into an Email
Copy as written, or edit to suit
"ErgoSphere is a Human Factors assessment platform that consolidates our assessment methods, project data and reporting into one environment. A seat is $4,900 a year, which at a $150 hourly rate is about 33 hours of practitioner time, or roughly 45 minutes a week. Our current process loses more than that per report in formatting and re-entry alone. It runs locally with no project data leaving our machines, and reviewers do not need a paid seat. I would like to run a short trial and measure the hours against our current baseline before committing."
Pricing current at time of printing. See ergosphere.com.au for the current rate.
