By Jag Gattu, CEO at UptimeAI
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.
Every industrial software vendor promises transformation: faster diagnoses, fewer surprises, a healthier bottom line.
Today’s market places too much responsibility on the customer when it comes to validating these promises. For executives deciding where to put scarce digital investment dollars, the ambiguity gets expensive, and it can be the reason that a promising pilot never reaches enterprise scale. It’s not because technology isn’t valuable, but you need to be able to build a business case that finance can trust.
This is why, in a market swamped with self-reported ‘proven results’ we invested in helping your teams build a confident business case. Conducting economic studies like the Verdantix Verified Value Delivery (VVD) methodology is not inexpensive and it’s not trivial. It involves hours of interviews with UptimeAI customers to parse out exactly how they are realizing value from the technology, then building that into a calculation framework that can apply across company sizes, industry verticals, and products deployed.
We think it’s important that our customers understand what value they should expect from the earliest days of engagement – in the form of proof, not promise.
How do you measure the impact of something that never happened?
One of the biggest challenges for predictive technologies, particularly in the reliability space, is the definition of success. When our software works exactly as intended, the outcome is often nothing happens. The cost savings of avoiding unplanned failures and unit shutdowns are typically only quantified when the shutdown actually occurs. So how do you quantify the value of something that never happened?
Since UptimeAI started, our customer success team has worked with every customer to track every alert and diagnosis that prevented a failure and aligned with the customer on what that catch was worth. They comb through past failure events, the lost production, the maintenance expenses, then the system learns the value in warning of that failure mode, so that next time value is automatically assigned. We know that our champions are constantly being asked to justify spend on operational technologies, and we view it as our job to make that task as easy as possible for them.
Customer interviews confirmed UptimeAI’s commitment to defensible value
Verdantix conducted interviews of 5 global customers, using their responses to build a model of expected returns for various company demographics. Specifically, for a model $200M-revenue manufacturing site, 3-year ROI of 197% grows to 250% as they expand enterprise-wide, and the software has fully paid for itself in 11 months. In some cases, it’s much faster.
For one major global cement company – “We had 4 critical alerts in first 6 months of the pilot, when we were very conscious of the value to justify further investment in the solution, and this recouped the cost of the investment.” We continue to compress this payback period by delivering more value, sooner, through more agent products and workflows.
An exciting future ahead
197% ROI is exciting, but that’s just getting started. In just 6 months since the study was completed, there are already so many additional value streams that our customers are seeing leveraging new agents. I can’t wait to see what the next year will bring for our current and future customers.
For the full details, read the full Verdantix VVD study.
