Your SAP Change Impact Business Case Needs Five Numbers, and None of Them Come From a Vendor
If a vendor is telling you what your ROI is going to be, probably just stop right there. We sell tools, from various vendors. We pass through partner discounts from our bulk buying discounts and we supply services to make sure you can adopt the tools to get to the best possible ROI number, but the ROI estimates we often see have sparked this article.
Most pitches include a percentage or good looking metric somewhere in the deck. Somebody in finance asks where it came from, and the honest answer is a product page, and the meeting moves on. The box has been checked but it's always struck me as odd when it bypasses scrutiny. And the times it does get scrutinized, it generally ends poorly so we're going to talk about how you can skip that entirely. All you need is five numbers, all of them yours, and you can probably produce four of them in an afternoon.
We apply this same approach in our SAP Change Impact Analysis article why nobody can prove what your transport touched which talks about the need for the tool, and this one prices it.
Why the published figures don't belong in your model
Vendors, in this case Tricentis and its partners (us included), publish numbers on test scope reduction, release acceleration, production error rates, and hypercare cost. Some of it is marketing copy and some comes from commissioned research, which is better sourced but still commissioned.
Both produce useful metrics but they are telling you the same thing, "which levers are worth measuring". Put either one in your model and you've handed the skeptic in the room a free win, because if they ask where the number came from, and you give them any of the answers above...you can't answer what they are really asking, which is "how does this number apply to our business".
