All technology investments require the use of employee time, capital expenses, and ongoing operational expenses. The most successful technology implementations can be evaluated in terms of their high Return on Investment (ROI) and their short payback period.
Small technology projects that are narrowly defined have lower risks, but limit the reward potential for the amount of resources being invested. Large projects may have greater risks, but their reward potential may be more meaningful to the company. The best technology investments are those that generate large incremental benefits with relatively small marginal investment.
What Is Your ROI?
Use our ROI Calculator to determine the return on investment for the ImageSite solution that you are considering. Select one of the four pre-configured User Scenarios (Small Archive, Design DMS/PDM, Internal Collaboration, External Collaboration) to get a feel for the possible costs, likely benefits, and resulting ROI for each scenario.
Modify an existing scenario or create one from scratch by identifying the core users whose problems you intend to tackle first. Once you've evaluated the ROI for core users, add new users and additional departments to evaluate the incremental cost and incremental benefits of different user scenarios. See how small increases in costs through expansion to other potential users can produce large incremental benefits for your firm, and increase your overall ROI.
A Small Archive System
A document control group may regularly respond to requests for copies of engineering plans or other corporate documents. This kind of group can significantly improve its efficiency with the implementation of a small archival solution. Since the investment is small, the risks are low and may be a very effective use of company funds. A small investment may result in a payback period of only a few months and yield many tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits over a few years. This targeted type of implementation typically tries to "do the same thing, only better." In other words, there is little emphasis on re-engineering the business processes involved. This is a conservative way to generate meaningful results.
Expanding from Document Control to Document Distribution
An alternative approach to the same project is to think differently about how to solve the problem. While the first step for this document control group is to find better tools to store, manage, find, and print corporate documents, their ultimate goal is to provide a more efficient way for everyone in the company to access important corporate information.
Once documents are being more effectively managed by the document control group, significant benefits will result by allowing direct access to these documents by end users throughout the company. This represents a shift in use of technology from "doing the same thing, only better," to leveraging new technologies to substantially improve a company's overall work process.
In this scenario, the small incremental cost of software licenses to provide direct access by end users who need access to corporate documents can yield very large benefits, and therefore generate a much larger ROI than a smaller initial investment that focuses only on the document control staff.
All technology investments require the use of employee time, capital expenses, and ongoing operational expenses. The most successful technology implementations can be evaluated in terms of their high Return on Investment (ROI) and their short payback period.
Small technology projects that are narrowly defined have lower risks, but limit the reward potential for the amount of resources being invested. Large projects may have greater risks, but their reward potential may be more meaningful to the company. The best technology investments are those that generate large incremental benefits with relatively small marginal investment.
