How to calculate the ROI of a Business Intelligence implementation?
There are a ton of things indirectly related that are hard to specifically say will improve because of BI, but one of the easiest ways would be to look at what kind of manual reporting time it will be replacing.
In our cases, we ended up eliminating the need for tons of different monthly reports being done by different departments. Look at the time it took to make those reports before, and how much it will take afterward and apply cost that way.
ROI (Return On Investments) is good to show the intangible benefits as well. Maybe what was once a monthly report can now be seen daily, allowing management and front-line employees to react more quickly and potentially improve efficiency, make decisions much faster and drive businesses forward faster. Those are definitely benefits, but the innovative project realization depends on strength of the management team.
We prepared our standard business case of NLSQL implementation in Excel format with formulas, so anyone can play with its own estimations for calculation time saved per day, per month, and annually. You can download it using the link below.
Meanwhile, try to look at decisions being made with data that are served to the business. Identify the costs of making incorrect decisions and the gains from making correct decisions. Identify the gains from returning decisions in a timely manner.
After implementation, you will be able to count the frequency of decisions made and compare it with the period before implementation. Eventually, compare that with new BI tool implementation costs.
