Business Value with Oracle

Isn’t the “hit” rate for print advertising about 3%?  By “hit” rate I really mean response rate – offering a product/service via print and then getting the solicited party to respond.
I’m not yet even talking about conversion – converting that offering to a sale.
Targeted print or print-on-demand certainly does increase both the response & conversion rates – but still not significantly.

Social Media truly allows you to measure your advertising ROI.  How so, you ask?

How about each of the following?

• Counting your number of followers (Twitter)
• Trust factor (Klout)
• Likes, views and/or interactions (Facebook)
• Comments (Blogs)
• Tracking of conversations and/or visitors (Content Tracker or Google Analytics)

Retailers are the trend setters here.  Most are sending tweets with discounts (coupon offerings).

Let me know your thoughts.  I’d love to hear from you!

Nearly all of us at one point in time have been told that our price is too high.  My most recent experience happened just a few days ago.

A little background.  We have been performing work for this particular client for nearly a year.  The current consulting project is going well.  Additionally, we had previously conducted a successful cross functional area training engagement for 50 students.

We were then introduced by our current client contacts to a new person within their organization.  This person happens to work within Strategic Sourcing.

The very first thing spoken was “We have some cost reduction goals for this fiscal year.  We would like to continue to use you, but you will need to reduce your price.”

There is no doubt that a statement like that can make even the most experienced person frustrated.  What about all the positives we have brought to the project???  What about the knowledge transfer than has occurred between our team and yours???

Our discussion then turned to value.  We talked about the investment each party has made over the course of the last year.  We discussed the familiarity and working relationship of our teams.  We discussed the successful project work (consulting & training) we have accomplished to date.  We discussed the fact that we have been engaged since the project’s inception and had initially been hired to construct the overall technical architecture.  We discussed some challenges we have overcome (late payment, management error, etc.) that sometimes initially occur when setting the foundation for a long-term relationship.

I’ll let you know how it all goes.  We are still “discussing” our various price vs. value positions.

A friend of mine has been working with a prospect for a number of months.
The prospect continues to request additional ROI information in order to justify the initial purchase of hardware, software, services and training – “What other applications and departments could take advantage of this solution?”

Note: The business justification (ROI) document based upon specific client feedback and data (no industry-average data was used) demonstrated a positive return within the client’s 36-month payback target.

The prospect is change averse.  The “point” person (PMO Officer) at the prospect’s location has recently left the company in part due to their inability to make a decision.

Is it possible that additional ROI can paralyze an organization further?  Can ROI cause “analysis paralysis”?

Let me know your thoughts.
I’d love to hear from you on this subject.

Net Present Value (NPV) is defined as the sum of the present values of the individual cash flows.

Solely relying on NPV will not address the overall loss or gain of actually executing a technology initiative. Many times internal rate of return is used as a complement to NPV when attempting to better understand a percentage gain relative to the investments made for a project.

What about adjusting for risk by adding a premium to the discount rate? A bank may certainly charge a higher rate of interest for a riskier project, but that does not mean this is a valid NPV approach to adjusting for risk. If some risk is incurred leading to a loss, then a discount rate in the NPV will reduce the impact of the loss below its accurate financial cost. You might want to consider a risk approach that requires identifying and valuing risks explicitly and thus explicitly calculating the cost of financing any/all losses incurred.

What happens when the amount of cash (inflow minus outflow) is generally negative late in a project (e.g., a custom component(s) Service-Level Agreement is offered (and must be paid) just prior to project sign-off)? The company owes money, so a high discount rate is overly idealistic. A reasonable solution for consideration is to calculate the cost of financing a situation such as the one described above.

Many of my colleagues say this question is easy to answer.  What do you think?

Document Management – central repository with search (metadata and/or full text).  Plug in one or more criteria and the solution brings back the exact information you are looking for at that moment.  Compelling!

Web Content Management – automatic conversion and rendering of content to one or more web viewable formats – on multiple websites within your company.  No longer have to wait for an IT resource to review, convert and post your content.  Irresistible!

Records Management – Automatic retention and disposition of content based upon your corporate file plan.  Fantastic!

Similar benefits and returns exist for collaboration and digital asset management.

But don’t you think IPM’s value proposition is the easiest to understand?  Particularly for end users.

The Aberdeen Group published in 2008 a study in its E-Payables Benchmark Series: Imaging & Workflow detailing the differences between manual vs. electronic invoice processing costs for Accounts Payable.  Findings have been detailed below:

Average manual per invoice processing costs:

Purchase Order-based invoices: $20.30
Non Purchase Order-based invoices: $21.10
Other invoices: $21.30

Average electronic per invoice processing costs:

Purchase Order-based invoices: $12.60
Non Purchase Order-based invoices: $14.00
Other invoices: $12.40

Customers understand these numbers.  Not a lot of gray here.  Real benefit is improved speed related to Accounts Payable cycle time.  Let’s say you could reduce the Accounts Payable cycle by twenty (20) days.  That would certainly be significant.

What do you think?