In this episode, I was joined by Chuck Coxhead who is the Director of Sales and Marketing at Procensis. I often talk to solutions providers on the show and we talk about the solutions they provide but when I connected with Chuck we wanted to explore how do we get these solutions into our operations and have them make sense. In this episode, we discuss the ins and outs of ROI, benefit-cost analysis, and how to present those solutions to decision-makers in your organization.

Key Takeaways

• Chuck works for Procensis which is a mobility and network design solutions provider that helps to improve your operation’s overall workflow. They work with many different providers, including the ones we have featured on the show previously, so they have the ability to give you the best overall solution for you and not just one solution. With so many different solutions on the market, it is great that there is the ability to work with a company that can help you get the best for you matched up and put together to give you the best flow.
• ROI is the return on investment and when it comes to making a decision for purchasing a new solution for your operation the numbers need to make sense. Without a good ROI, you will most likely not get the green light to go forward with implementation or purchase. Chuck gives us a great breakdown of what ROI is and how it relates to our industry. Simply put, in the majority of companies, if you cannot put together a proper ROI your proposal or project will most likely not go too far. Chuck is very familiar with this as he is on the sales side of trying to get solutions into operations and helps companies understand what they can gain from certain solutions every day.
• One thing that Chuck points out is that you need to look at the cost-benefit analysis in addition to the ROI. This will help you understand where you are saving on costs at a much more detailed level. You can be implementing something that directly relates to one process but can have an impact on multiple other processes as well. This is a key to not only understanding the true benefits of a new solution but also to understanding where improvements can be made. We also discuss one important process of this is doing a proper time study to understand where in your process you are spending lots of time thus spending lots of money.
• When we look at ROI and the cost-benefit analysis often times we get caught up in only the quantitative numbers but miss some of the larger benefits. Chuck goes deep into discussing these different factors like safety, learning, and overall employee well-being. These are hard things to measure but the cost savings over time can be huge. From my experience, decreasing training time can be a huge benefit and savings to keep your operation flowing even when headcount fluctuates.

Listen to the episode below and let us know what you factor into your calculations in the comments.