TranscriptDon Mishory: With those metrics in mind, how do you know when you’ve achieved value? Obviously, you can hit the metric but do you look at things like usage metrics, successful pilots, etc. What are some of the tangible steps along the way to getting to those metrics?
Jim MacLennan: Well the key is to use metrics that the business is used to. Especially if you’re talking about value per shareholders, those are the financial metrics that everyone’s used to. Things like earnings growth or cots of goods or driving down sgna or inventory turns or cost of poor quality, things operationally that they’re used to using. If you’re project is going to use those metrics as ways to express their value, you’re taking a step in the right direction.
But, if we’re talking about digital transformation or digital projects, now you can actually start using some of those digital concepts, things like daily active users. If you’re talking about a customer site, a ecommerce site, you’re going to want to see daily active users but why can’t you use the same type of metrics for your internal processes? Do you understand how many people inside your own company are using this price look up or using this excel spreadsheet that they shouldn’t be using. Or you spent all that money on this system and nobody seems to be using it.
So you can merge together these ideas of traditional metrics - inventory turns - with new age or digital metrics like daily average users and see how people are actually using your systems. And now you can start to drill into getting the value that you always wanted.
