Overview
We recently commissioned Forrester to produce a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study into Cora PPM. They conducted in depth interviews with representatives from four businesses currently using Cora, and submitted those findings to extensive analysis using their industry-standard framework to evaluate the investment value.
This enables them to precisely calculate the cost savings and business value in terms of costs, benefits, flexibility and risk so they can produce their own, independent evaluation. The resulting TEI report contains a number of notable findings.
Operational Efficiencies
“Efficiency improvements worth $25 million over three years”
The report concludes that the operational efficiencies from using Cora to digitize your data and centralize documents, and from being able to seamlessly integrate all your systems and software into the one, central system, reduces the average project time from nine to three months.
This will give you an extra six months during your first year to use the application to generate more business, or to create further efficiencies elsewhere. Which, for a company with annual revenues of around $20 billion, results in savings worth $25 million over three years.
Improved Visibility
One of the most valuable benefits you get from using PPM software is the improved visibility it gives you. It provides you with granular visibility into each individual project, but it also gives you that 30,000 foot bird’s-eye view of your portfolio as a whole.
Specifically, the time that project managers save from being able to compile all their reports using a single platform, and using shared data that are permanently up to date and immediately accessible, saves them an average of 6 hours a month. Over three years, those savings add up to some $6.5 million.
Better Margin Management
“1% additional revenue”
Cora suite of Project Controls tools allow you to monitor and respond to change requests as they occur, in real time. This enables PMs and the senior management team to track and manage any changes to project scope as they happen, so that you can bill appropriately for the work requested.
Forrester calculate that those margin increases result in 1% additional revenue, and that over three years, that equates to $7 million.
Managerial Time Savings
When managers have to waste time going from one department to the next in search of the information they need, and then have to spend more time determining how reliable all the data are, it not only costs the organisation money, in terms of time spent. It’s detrimental to employee morale.
Having all that information immediately to hand, and knowing that everything’s reliable, up to date and consistent, saves line managers more than 4 hours per week. Which, over three years, produces savings of $4.4 million.
More Effective Investments
The bird’s-eye view of your portfolio that Cora PPM provides you with, together with a set of tools that allows you to explore any number of what-if scenarios, improves your project prioritization and selection process. This, according to the report, improves your internal R&D “by at least 15%”. Which, over three years, is worth $3.1 million.
When you add all of those benefits up and weigh them against the cost of installing Cora PPM, the result is an increase in net present value (NPV) of $30.05M and an ROI of 187% over 3 years.
Further Insights
1. The TEI report was a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting in 2023. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the results from their research and created a single, composite organization, a US-based global manufacturing company with annual revenue of $20bn. All figures quoted refer to calculations based around this composite company.
