The time-to-value quotient

I was recently asked to compare one of our products to a supposed competitor in the marketplace. In reality we see the two as playing different roles and in some ways complementary to eachother. Different users have different needs and goals and the two products in question would be of value to intersecting subsets of the overall user community.

As I worked through a somewhat lengthy list of differences I came to the benefit of "time-to-value". There is frequent talk about the ROI (return on investment) and this is undoubtedly an important criterion when assessing the corporate spend - hey - you want to get a return on that don't you? If not, why are you doing it? And of course there is "hard" ROI in terms of money saved, time reduced, risk mitigated, and "soft" ROI in terms of happier people, fewer nuisance queries, better survey results - those things harder to measure and sometimes harder still to marry improvements back to a specific cause.

"Time-to-value" is a little different - how long will it take for you to start recovering some of that return on investment? The ROI may be substantial but in the case say of rolling out a new ERP system the project could be long and tortuous and it may be some time before you start to get your hands on a little of that "value".

The companion process solutions for SunSystems from PA have without exception a very rapid time-to-value. This benefit comes predominatly from one single core premise - a product that is seamlessly and natively integrated to your core system "out of the box" (in our case Infor SunSystems) is always going to give you a shorter and more cost effective time-to-value than an alternative.

Some of our small footprint products can be up and running with key users trained within half a day. The challenges and complexities of getting one piece of software to talk to another are largely removed from the installation task because of that native integration.

On the other end of the scale our iPOS eProcurement for SunSystems suite may need anything from 5 to 50 days to implement and configure depending on the size and complexity of the client requirements. However our knowledge of the market tells us that this is invariably only 50% of the time required for competitive products that are missing the all important pre-existing, deep seated integration.

Time-to-value is a very worthy criterion during a product selection process.