Alinean

ROI Analyst™

Helping sales professionals, consultants and channel partners make the business case for change

• How can compelling Cx-level business cases be created for unique solution and services value propositions? 
• How can current spreadsheet based ROI tools be migrated to more credible, easier to use, more scalable and more maintainable solution?
• How can sales professionals be empowered to adopt and credibly apply ROI analysis and business value sales tool best practices to improve selling effectiveness and shorten sales cycles?
• How can a business value sales tools be delivered that is easy to maintain for product marketing, easy to use for sales professionals, but comprehensive enough for consultants and scrutinizing economic buyers? 
• How can a single corporate standard be created for cost effective development and delivery of ROI analysis and business value sales tools for all stages in the buying cycle and for all solutions? 

Alinean's ROI Analyst™ solution empowers your sales force, consultants and channel partners to interactively create and deliver credible and customized cost-justification business cases to prospects and customers. With ROI Analyst, the team can be empowered to make the case of change, delivering the bottom-line justification as to why a prospect or customer should implement the proposed solutions.

Customized for particular selling scenarios, solution and service sets and offerings, ROI Analyst is designed to uniquely convey the value and return on investment (ROI) of these solutions, demonstrating your organization's competitive advantage.

    Featured ROI Analyst™ Tools:

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ExpertROI Analyst™

Branch Office Calculator

The Alinean ROI Analyst first starts by helping your team collect valuable sizing and opportunity information. Pre-loaded with industry, location and size research developed by Alinean (in conjunction with IDC and Wipro), only data the customer knows needs to be populated early in the sales cycle. This helps to dramatically speed early analysis workshops, and also ease the overall burden of data collection on all stakeholders. The defaults are clearly highlighted, and can be easily replaced over time in more detailed sessions as metric and cost information is researched, creating a more personalized analysis.

Second, assessing the opportunity, the tool automatically configures and recommends a solution to best solve the identified issues. The customer or prospect can select any solution options, and then based on the configuration and opportunity, the impact of the solution is simulated on costs and benefits to produce an ROI analysis. Direct and indirect business benefits, IT savings and risks , and needed IT capital, labor services and business unit investments are all quantified to create a credible, third party validated ROI estimate.

Third, the user can present the results online in compelling charts and graphs, or create CFO-ready ROI PPT and Word reports, integrating your marketing materials and messages with tool results to create a complete value based proposal.

Features of the ROI Analyst tool include:

• Quick ROI - Information is easily collected from the prospect's team. From this information and using third-party validated research metrics from Alinean (and partners IDC and WiPro), a Quick ROI analysis can be developed in 15 minutes or less. From this initial assessment, the team can then commit to dedicate more time to collect additional metrics from the customer, and more precisely assess the impact of the proposed practices, solutions and project.

• Detailed CFO-Ready ROI - From detailed information about the current AS IS business, costs, and opportunities, and using Alinean third-party validated calculations and metrics, a CFO-ready ROI  report can be developed in about one hour. Financial calculations include IT and business unit costs, IT cost reductions, business operating efficiency and strategic advantage improvements, direct and indirect benefits, risk, intangible (strategic) benefits, ROI, TCO (As Is to To Be), NPV, IRR and payback period.

• Instant ROI Reports and Presentations - By providing answers to simple questions about the current AS IS environment, business and opportunities, and by selecting the recommended solution, a 5 page executive summary Word report, 15+ page PPT executive presentation, or complete 60+ page ROI analysis report is automatically generated. Reporting supports Word and PPT export so that further customization or integration into other proposals or presentations can easily be performed.

• Customized for Competitive Advantage - Completely customized to communicate your unique benefits and value - not a generic business case. Business case templates developed by Alinean are typically delivered to the field within 6 weeks of project kick-off and include third party validated methodologies, calculations and research metrics.  Customized ROI templates can be developed by porting your existing spreadsheet based models, or having Alinean analysts work with your subject matter experts to create original models.

• Includes all key calculations - Integrated calculations for ROI, risk adjusted ROI, Net Present Value (NPV) savings, Internal Rate of Return (IRR), payback period, and TCO (As Is vs. To Be). Includes summaries of benefits by type, goal and stakeholder, and analysis of investments as cap-ex / op-ex and business unit vs. IT.

• Point Solution and Portfolio Selling Support - Support for selling a single solution, or aggregation of a portfolio of product / solutions, with the ability to convey the unique value of each solution, and roll-up / aggregation capability to convey the combined value of proposals for different projects, .

• ROI Expertise and Credibility - Customized third-party validated research from our Alinean Value Base of over 20,000 worldwide companies, and a customized white paper to explain the Alinean ROI Dashboard methodology, calculations and research.  Additional research and validation available from ROI / business value partner IDC.

• "What-if" Analysis - tools to simulate the impact of project timing, schedules, accelerations, risk impacts, direct vs. indirect (hard vs. soft) realized benefit differences and user roll-out / adoption. Quarterly analysis for visibility into project timing and delays.

• Resource and KPI Analysis - Simulation of resource and project key performance indicators (KPI) benefits enabling post-project auditing and validation.

• Dynamic Benefit Builder (DBB) - using an easy to use wizard, the ability to add customized KPIs and benefits to any analysis. Can be used to completely customize the analysis for any unique customer, solution, or business case.

• Corporate Impact Analysis (P/L, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow) - Benefits are analyzed to not only show the project cash flow, but the impact on the corporate financials - translating the project ROI directly into the language of the CFO. Pre-tax and post tax views available.

• Worldwide selling support - including localized metrics, model content and logic and multiple currency support. Support for easy translation of Word and PPT reports, as well as model content.

• Collaborative Team Selling - On any account, sales professionals, product managers, consultants, partners and customers can be invited to collaborate on the business case. Features and security are enabled based on user profiles and administration.

• Personalization and Auditing - Every metric, assumption and calculation can be customized to reflect the prospects unique business case. Each entry is audited allowing the team to track who provided key information and defend results.

• Benefits Documentation - Benefit assumptions are documented to credibly support the benefit defaults and assumptions with third-party references, and highlight the features and benefits of the proposed solution(s) in delivering tangible value. Clearly highlights benefits by different customizable groupings such as top benefits, goals and stakeholders.

• Standardized Enterprise Wide - Delivers a complete enterprise-wide standard for assuring credible ROI business cases worldwide using one software platform, one interface, one library and personalized content for the entire team

• Connected and Disconnected Operation - Internet Software as a Service (standard) or desktop application (pack n go option) installation with centralized control and synchronization.

• Open Authoring System - your company's own ROI experts can author or edit their own business cases, and easily publish the content for use on a particular deal, or to support the entire team. This provides a method to maintain customized models and capture unique ROI knowledge for enterprise institutionalization.  No software programming is needed - simply edit and format spreadsheets for import into the tool.

• Usage Reports - With a centralized database usage reports can be generated to track usage (such as which customers the analyses were performed on) and promote adoption.  Monthly overview usage reports are automatically e-mailed to core stakeholders to maintain constant visibility.

• Value Expert™ Certification - Optional customized education and certification class on business value sales tools, as well as Certified Authoring programs.

• Uses the Alinean ROI Dashboard™ to calculate and convey value

• Uses the EnterpriseROI™ sales tool platform to deliver an enterprise ready worldwide enabled, standardized, scalable sales tool, and suite.

Benefits

• Engage with Cx and economic buyers using compelling business value assessments and personalized business cases

• Decrease the sales cycle by building the business case with the client, rather than having them struggle on their own to create justification reports

• Reduce discounting and increase deal size by selling business value versus feature, function and price

• Improve the credibility of business cases via third party research and validation, and industry standard methodology and tool-kit

• Reduce the time it takes to develop compelling and credible business cases from weeks to hours

• Increase proposal success rate by 60%, raising its priority via quantified costs, value and risks

• Competitively differentiate solutions by proving value and cost savings advantages

• Drive channel sales loyalty by providing value added business value sales tools