It comes as a piece of evidence that nowadays IT architectures are much easier to operate than what they used to be in a recent past and bring much more value to their users, mostly because each user has embraced digitization in each and every task of her daily routine.
But the undoubtedly value brought by IT does not spare us from studying the real, accountable return on investment that each piece of software can attain. There are 4 key business metrics you need to put figures in ARender ROI calculation.
The 4 key business metrics you need to put figures on when calculating Arender ROI are:
- The average number of active users
- The average number of cases processed
- The average number of documents per case (or processed per user)
- The average number of pages per document
Let’s give some more details on each of these metrics:
The average number of active users
The point of knowing the target audience sounds obvious, especially because lots of costs in an IT project are fixed costs with regards to the number of users. The more the users, the less the cost per user, the better the ROI, at least for the part of the fixed costs.
But having correct figures here may be a bit tricky. A user not actually using the infrastructure will not request any of its resources, but he will not gain any benefit either.
And unless your business unit is made up of large teams of colleagues dedicated to performing the same tasks, there are very few changes their workload and process habits will be homogeneous, and that their usage of ECM systems or any document-related services will be strictly identical.
The simplest way to proceed here can be to start by the total number of candidate users of the target system and estimate a ratio of currently active users over the total population.
Finding this ratio, expressed as a percentage of the total population, will depend on the job types and task types of your users. The following abacus can prove itself useful:
If your users population is diverse, you will need to categorize your users to estimate a global active users ratio.
For example :
The average number of cases processed
This, of course, mostly depends on what is your case.
It is well known that employees spend around 30% of their time actually searching for information to fulfill their tasks.
A document viewer such as ARender is not a Business Process Management interface, so we are not interested here in detailing how each user finds the tasks he has to handle.
What is however of great interest is how the user, after having selected the task he is working on, will open all the related documents. How he will enter the case, the main documents attached to it, and all the related parts not strictly bound to this case, but required to perform the job.
When the user is presented with the correct information at the very early stages of his task processing, he becomes much more efficient and doesn’t lose time finding his first steps.
To produce an accurate figure for these metrics, we will need to determine what is an average case to operate upon.
Estimating the average number of cases processed will not be of much help if the cases are too different. But then again, categorizing the cases can be useful.
For back-office teams, cases are often well known and well defined, especially when Key Performance Indicators are bound to the number of cases produced over a given amount of time.
Front-office teams may have some more variance, but most activities involving interaction with customers, especially in B2C, have good estimates of the average interaction time.
But what remains may be more complex.
Consider legal departments for example; complex cases involving large sets of documents, and a huge diversity in the processing time of each case.
The average number of documents per case or processed per user
This metric is often easier to figure out, whether directly, because we have in mind what makes up a case, or indirectly, just dividing the total number of documents in the repository by the number of cases actually processed, for example on a given amount of time, e.g. over the last year.
The average number of documents per case gives a good indication of the case complexity and will lead us to the usage users have of their document repository and workflow system.
The average size of documents (number of pages, number of bytes)
This metric is important both for business impacts and on a much more technical level.
Even nowadays, where most of the remote agencies are fiber-connected, and multiple sites no longer suffer from the xDSL era of low bandwidth, network connectivity remains an issue.
Nomad users use wireless networks to work.
Overseas offices still suffer from high latency, varying bandwidths, and network operators still charge customers on an average bandwidth pricing model.
The bigger the needs, the bigger the bill.
Documents with a large number of pages are generally the largest ones in byte size, and that is where the streaming features of ARender come on stage.
Reckon the ROI of ARender advanced document viewer
Our website page "The ROI of Using the ARender Document Viewer" is dedicated to helping you, deciders, key users, IT managers, to precisely reckon the ROI of an advanced document viewer such as ARender.
This ROI computation will be structured this way:
- What are the key business metrics to estimate
- What is your current situation when it comes to document processing and viewing
- What are your expected benefits and potential ROI
Download the guide: The ROI of Using the ARender Document Viewer
