The bottom line and beyond: value and ROI in enterprise systems

Between licensing fees, consultants' fees, auditors' fees and more, your ERP system is a big investment. If you're like a lot of our customers, you're under a lot of pressure to justify those costs and show a clear ROI for any software you purchase on top of it. 

We designed Strongpoint to help with important business goals, like regulatory compliance and change management. In our experience, our customers tend to be so excited to stress less about these things that they don't think about too much about quantifying their effect on the bottom line. 

Recently, however, one Strongpoint user did. Here’s Bryan Willman, managing partner at NetSuite consultant Techfino, breaking it down in a SuiteApp review: 

We have found on several occasions where we've spent 25-50 hours or $5,000 - $10,000 on a single issue, just trying to pin-point the root cause of an issue raised in production. Here, we come to find that it was some checkbox that was unchecked on a field for over a year in Production and no one ever noticed that DEV and QA. 

We have countless examples of large implementations where we see that the time spent manually documenting everything and making sure we deploy everything perfectly could easily be 2X to 5X the cost of procuring Strongpoint for that project. 

So Strongpoint is great for consultants. But what about internal NetSuite teams? Shouldn’t a company with dedicated resources on staff be able to manage their account without help? Let’s look at an example inspired by another customer’s experience.

In this case, the customer had a team of four — two admins and two devs, each of whom spent about 5 hours per week on discovery activities. Using Strongpoint’s impact analysis feature, they were able to cut that time in half.

So right away you have 10 hours of savings per week. If each employee is paid $130,000, or about $62/hr, that’s a savings of $620/week — or $31,000 over the course of a 50-week work year. 

And that’s just for one feature! This same customer also estimated that they saved around $3000 a year in troubleshooting costs by using Strongpoint’s environment comparison tool to ensure changes in the Sandbox and QA accounts were properly deployed to production.

What About SOX?

If you add SOX compliance into the mix, total savings with Strongpoint can easily reach into six figures each year. There's no question that for NetSuite teams at public and pre-IPO companies, audit prep and auditors' fees are a significant expense. Strongpoint's continuous auditing features delivers value in two ways:

• Prep time: With Strongpoint, NetSuite teams can avoid lengthy reviews of system notes and time-consuming SoD projects — effectively eliminating 90% of the manual work involved in audit prep. 
• Audit fees: Strongpoint customers not only save time getting ready for audit, the audits themselves go faster — and the risk of finding material deficiencies that require rework is virtually nonexistent. As a result, our customers find that their audit fees are reduced by up to 75%.

The Unquantifiables

Of course, choosing a piece of enterprise software is about more than just cost savings. We’ve found that our customers benefit in many broader ways, each of which have a subtle, but less quantifiable, impact on your bottom line. 

We call that “sleep at night” value. With your team empowered to make informed decisions that won’t break your critical business process — and full visibility into the changes they’re making — you can rest easy knowing your systems are healthy and safe. 

There’s a trickle-down effect to this, too. When admins and analysts have tools they need to work more effectively, and are less bogged down by rework and discovery, they’re happier in their jobs and can focus their expertise on more important projects. 

The Takeaway

What’s true for Strongpoint is true for any piece of business software. A closer look at the numbers can tell a story that may not be readily apparent in a standard sales pitch or feature sheet. Will this product help my team do more with their time? Will it mean not having to hire additional resources in the future? Will it prep us for the next stages of growth?

If you’d like to hear more about the specific value Strongpoint users are deriving from our software, head on over to the Customer Stories page to read some detailed case studies.