In 2021 Basis Technologies commissioned Forrester Consulting to create an independent, objective estimate of the quantifiable financial benefit delivered by ActiveControl – Basis Technologies’ DevOps automation software – to SAP users.

The resulting Total Economic Impact (TEI) study concluded that a typical ActiveControl user could achieve a return on investment of 245% and generate $1.24 million in net economic benefits over a three-year period, with the software paying for itself in less than six months.

What is a Total Economic Impact Study?

Forrester – a globally recognized research and consulting firm – has spent over 35 years partnering with organizations of every size, across every industry, to help them understand the challenges their customers are facing and how they can adapt to changing demands and markets.

Forrester’s Total Economic Impacting consulting practice develops business value justification analysis to help organizations understand the financial impact of a technology investment. The TEI is a proven industry-standard framework that models all aspects of a piece of technology or solution and the associated impacts on the business and illustrates the ROI of products and services.

The TEI of ActiveControl

Basis Technologies commissioned Forrester to create a TEI study on ActiveControl to provide future customers with an independent, objective framework – derived from direct end user experience – that helps them to evaluate the potential financial benefit of advanced SAP DevOps automation.

In creating the ActiveControl TEI study Forrester interviewed eight end user representatives at five different firms, then aggregated the data to create a single composite organization. From there, Forrester used their standardized TEI methodology to construct a financial model representative of the experiences shared in the interviews.

Forrester consider four core factors when creating a model of potential investment value: benefits, costs, flexibility and risk. Together these factors combine to provide a realistic, holistic view that goes beyond typical ROI calculations.

The Challenges

Though the ActiveControl users interviewed by Forrester reported various problems with the change management solutions – both manual and automated – in place before they adopted ActiveControl, the group highlighted three common challenges which formed the basis of the TEI study.

• A limited number of deployments – due to reliance on spreadsheets and emails to develop, test, and deploy SAP changes, which led to complex and tedious workflows, new business functionalities and changes could only be implemented a few times a year.
• Interruption to business operations – manual workflows characterized by errors and loss of information meant that deployments often disrupted critical business operations leading to increased costs.
• Insufficient resource allocation – with so much time spent on manual deployment of SAP change, resources could not be deployed to other value-add projects.

The Outcomes

Using the customer interviews as a foundation, Forrester’s TEI model produced three quantified outcomes of ActiveControl over a three-year period:

• Increased speed and efficiency worth almost $900,000
• Quality improvement and risk reduction worth more than $825,000
• Compliance and reporting savings of almost $20,000

Greater speed and efficiency

Every organization shared with Forrester how ActiveControl helped them develop and deploy critical changes at the speed they required. The reduction in manual effort enabled by the features of ActiveControl led to a significant drop in overall development cycle times and enabled faster deployment to production environments.

Better quality and less risk

SAP teams reported that ActiveControl improved the quality of the changes, as well at the speed at which they can be deployed. The agility and visibility provided by ActiveControl meant less post-testing rework was required, deployment errors were significantly reduced, and the defects that remained could be fixed far more easily. In fact, the TEI estimates that the composite organization would be able to eliminate 90% of deployment errors and 98.5% of remediation effort.

More efficient compliance and reporting

Nearly every customer interviewed by Forrester for the TEI study shared the same frustration with the tedious, time-consuming task of gathering and organizing the information required for audit purposes – whether to comply with internal processes or for external regulatory oversight. With ActiveControl, users were able to find and gather the necessary documentation in a fraction of the time.

Unquantifiable value

Perhaps just as important as the potential financial benefits calculated by the TEI study, were the many other outcomes the interviewees knew they getting from ActiveControl but didn’t feel able to quantify in terms of specific financial value.

For example, interviewees recognized that the impact – both operational and financial – of minimizing errors and downtime in Production SAP systems may be far greater than the (quantifiable) value of being able to more easily fix issues that do occur. Other unquantified benefits they identified included improved time to market, closer alignment of change to business and market needs, and enhanced employee satisfaction.

Conclusion

The Forrester TEI study demonstrates that ActiveControl delivers significant value to organizations looking to reduce manual effort, improve deployment quality and accelerate time-to-value across SAP environments. These gains in efficiency, quality and speed enable organizations to deliver on business strategy and goals.

If this blog has piqued your interest, download the complete study here or get in touch to speak with one of our automation experts about the value ActiveControl could bring to your organization.

* Customers referenced in this article did not participate in the ActiveControl TEI study.