TABLE OF CONTENTS 
Traditionally most impact evaluation studies stop with a tabulation of business results, which is a Level 4 evaluation. In those situations, the program is considered successful if it produced improvements such as productivity increases, quality enhancements, absenteeism reductions, or customer satisfaction improvements. While these results are important, it is more insightful to convert the data to monetary value and show the total impact of the improvement. The monetary value is also needed to compare the cost of the program to develop the ROI. This evaluation is the ultimate level of the five-level evaluation framework presented in Chapter 1. This chapter shows how leading organizations are moving beyond just tabulating business results and are adding another step of converting data to monetary value. Chapter 3 outlined the methods used to collect data. Chapter 4 described a variety of techniques to isolate the effects of training. This chapter outlines techniques that convert the data to monetary value.
After collecting performance data, many organizations find it helpful to divide data into hard and soft categories. Hard data are the traditional measures of organizational performance, as they are objective, easy to measure, and easy to convert to monetary values. Hard data are often very common measures, achieve high credibility with management, and are available in every type of organization. They are destined to be converted to monetary value and included in the ROI formula.
Hard data represent the output, quality, cost, and time of work-related processes.
