Does Your E-Mail Have ROI? Quarterly Update — 1999 Qtr 1

A features chart for e-mail software typically touts acronyms such as:

But here is another acronym to consider:

ROI — Return on Investment, defined as:

Revenue Increase or Cost Savings

Investment Cost

You might say, "E-mail can't have ROI — there's no quantifiable return on electronic mail." True enough — today, electronic mail is equivalent to a phone system, and it would be hard to quantify the return on either.

The trick to answering the question of ROI on e-mail is to recognize that e-mail is only a single technology, but that groupware reflects the business use of several technologies. Lotus Notes is not only the market leading e-mail package, but — unlike other packages that only do messaging, calendaring, and scheduling — it lets you build a foundation for current and future business processes, at an investment cost comparable to basic e-mail packages.

ROI comes not from technology, but from the correct application of technology to business. Business use of technology involves doing business processes better, cheaper, or faster. To use technology in this way requires more than simple e-mail — it requires features like:

• Replication to automatically distribute changed information.
• Database capabilities to store, retrieve, and search information.
• Tools to build forms and user interfaces.
• Actions that are scheduled or event-triggered.
• E-mail notification of new or changed items.
• Connections to other databases and systems.

Lotus Notes provides all of these capabilities in one integrated solution — something that no other product can currently claim. Some examples of how we used Lotus Notes to help our clients increase revenue or save costs through improved processes include:

• Better — A commercial contractor created a new line of business — that of collaboratively managing the pre-construction tasks of large projects with its major customers — based on the unique capabilities of Notes.
• Cheaper — A paper products company distributes and searches product information electronically, saving up to $96,000 a year in hardcopy printing and distribution costs, compared to the project cost of $10,000.
• Faster — A real estate manager requisitions, routes, reviews, and approves purchase requests in less than a day, versus several days under their previous system. Quicker reviews lead to better cost controls, especially on items such as advertising.

Does your e-mail provide ROI? If not, perhaps you should consider Lotus Notes.

One additional way in which we help our clients improve their ROI is by our reasonable billing rates — although we perform services comparable to those of large consulting firms, our rates reflect those of a local firm. Please call to find out more.

Very truly yours,

Todd L. Herman