Small businesses are increasingly turning up to new technology to help them achieve their administrative and functional goals. They are even feeling the need to back their workforce with enough automation support to help them perform and deliver optimally. In this process, small enterprises are planning to build a sustainable facility with high uptime and powerful equipment and resource assistance to enhance their technical ability and range to act and produce.
With that, it seems that procuring and practicing technology has become a primary need of the businesses to commit to latest business value propositions and market trends. So, what these organizations look to achieve by integrating technology in their system? Broadly these needs include enhancing their infrastructural capacity, improving IT security, effectively processing data, augmenting process utilization levels, optimally collaborating resources and assuring quality at different levels.
When you assign different roles to all these technological factors and calibrate them with specific operational entities, you get to measure the technology ROI (Return on Investment) for your small business.
We can enumerate these technological factors as:
- Server hardware
- Server software
- Licensing fees
- Installation and deployment
- Wipe and recycle old server
- Process enrichment
- Resource enhancement
- Infrastructural automation
- Support and maintenance
- Provisions for contingencies and downtime
These primarily are the most prevalent factors and traits that most organizations need to put up with to activate and validate a controlled automated system that aptly serves modern business requirements, irrespective of the industry type and service niche they belong to.
All these points can be further drilled down to exact requirements following precision matrix and involve component details to reach estimated figures. These figures can be further diagnosed for accuracy by comparing them with different cost parameters as per market standards.
When you have the itemized details with you along with cost assigned to each technological entity, place the expected utility against them and assign them scores. This will help you ascertain the real utility and application (both entity-wise and cumulatively) and you will be able to determine how far that cost invested fetches you return, giving you a gist of ROI.
Moving further, when you speak up with vendors don’t rely on ballpark figures or rough estimates. Ask them for fine details and consider going with use cases, stats, calculations, and comparisons to help you figure out the more accurate cost of ownership.
Now, based on these details measure returns considering parameters such as:
- Time savings from prompt and fast performance
- Time savings from greater reliability
- Direct cost savings by automated processes
- Direct cost savings such as lower fees or energy costs
- Time and cost savings from lower redundancy and errors
Again, the value of cost and time saved here can be assigned realistic values and quantified to be compared with the investment made in acquiring and deploying technology into the system. While doing this also involve the qualitative factors like increased customer satisfaction and improved processes and enhanced workforce contribution. Combining all these factors you will be able to reach more realistic and dependable measurements of technology ROI for your business.
