How to quantify the advantage of using JMP over other tools to convince the management to consider it for usage?

Question

Dear community,

we all know how great JMP is: efficient, interactive, powerful, ...

How would you make others, mainly management (the team itself is interested)  to consider using it? Especially when there are almost free available alternative software (incomparable with JMP) and exactly for that reason the management wants to continue going with it. The argument: "It is great because I know it" is not convincing. How would you quantify the advantage of JMP? Which metric would you consider to calculate the ROI?

I would be happy to hear from your experiences.

Merci!

Mark_Bailey · Accepted Answer

Your JMP sales team (account executive, system engineer) is prepared to help you with this request. Please contact them for assistance.

My reply is not intended to suggest that members of this community can't or won't help you with this request!

Think about the data-centric analytics that is most important to your company and share this view. That information helps everyone respond.

SDF1 · Accepted Answer

Hi @Aziza ,

I've had similar discussions with decision-making management where I am, and ROI is definitely a focus of theirs and it's very difficult to refocus that attention. One way you might consider, and one that I have been relatively successful at is estimating the time-saving costs by using the software.

For example, our organization has many different data files containing information that when brought all together brings more value than the data spread out. The process to do this manually would take a very long time, >1 day for each product that you'd want to look at. This process can be automated in JMP, resulting a merging of data that only takes about 1 hr for each product. It still might seem like a long time, but these files are stored on external servers, so the connection speed plays a big role in limiting how fast this process can take place.

In this example, if this is something that is done relatively routinely, lets say twice a month at 8 hrs each time (16 hrs X 12 months) when performed manually, your institute will be paying out almost $7000 each year for someone (each person AND each product) to manually pull that data together. This is assuming the 2080 hrs/yr and an employee overhead of $150,000/yr. Now, if it only takes 1 hr each time (2 hrs X 12 mo), your company is now only paying $1700 a year for the same result, resulting in a savings of $5300 a year. Since ROI are often measured to a three year period, you're company is saving about $16,000. So, would you purchase something for $16,000 knowing you'd recover that savings in 3 years? And that's only considering a single person's effort, and on only a single product. Multiply that by the number of JMP users and products, and now your company is saving a considerable amount of money and the ROI drops fast.

Again, when you consider the number of people needing to use software like JMP within your company, and how the speed and simplicity of using it can reduce the manual efforts, thereby resulting in a quantifiable monetary gain for the company (efficiency), this can help to redirect their focus on why it's a valuable resource to have.

Hopefully this can help you start thinking about things the way management wants to hear things and helps you generate a quantifiable argument that management can understand.

Good luck!,

DS

ron_horne · Accepted Answer

@Aziza ,

I can only talk from my experience. The amount of man hours jmpsaves is much higher than its cost. That simple.

Yes there are free alternatives out there and if you have a lot of time to write procedures and then use them infinitely you will achieve zero marginal cost. In this scenario it is difficult to justify any money spending.

But, if you need to modify things all the time and keep improving your procedures jmp is the way to go.  In no other software can you modify procedures and get script written as fast as with this program, no matter how good you are with writing code.

jmp is what enables the user to be very versatile and adaptive.new capabilities are achieved much faster in using this program.

with respect to the interactivity and hands on approach, every day i look into the data and find things that working in a black box would would be overlooked and most probably lead to making mistakes and getting erroneous results. how valuable is that to your company only they tell.

statman · Accepted Answer

I agree with Mark's recommendation.

What I would also do is create a comparison matrix.  Down the first column, list all of the analyses/applications you/they would be performing (You could use the menu).  Across the top list the software programs (or visa-versa)...something like this although more specific to your companies applications

louv · Accepted Answer

For me it was all about wanting to change one's work culture.

Being a change agent and selling management on the vision that an organization is much better off being in data driven problem solving culture which minimizes the emotion and personalities.

JMP is the vehicle to communicate change through meaningful analyses and an organizational vehicle to move the company ahead.

peng_liu · Accepted Answer

I am thinking of complementing what @Mark_Bailey and @statman said with an experiment or two.

Starting with picking a common task which you and your colleagues need to do quite frequently, as they suggested.

Let me use fitting and analyzing linear regression models as an example.

Step 1. List the steps that you need to accomplish the task by using JMP. And list the steps that you need to accomplish the same tasking using another software of your choice.

Step 2. Start timing how long each approach would take for you and your colleagues to finish.

Step 3. Change the data set, go to Step 2.

Repeat Step 2 and Step 3. To see how much difference between them. If there is difference, then in the end, use what @SDF1 suggested to convert time into money. You may have to try some different tasks to be fair, I guess

The above experiment is for some repetitive tasks. Now try some spontaneous tasks. For this experiment, you have to find two individuals who are experts of the two software that you are comparing. So one is a JMP expert, the other individual is specialized in the other software of your choice. Now pick some non-trivial tasks. For example, some kind of predictive modeling. The assessment includes at least two parts: (1) timing (2) accuracy. What you are going to observe will be the achieved accuracy under the same time constraints. Or you may observe the different time consumption to achieve the same accuracy. Seems like that the second measurement might be easier to convert the difference into cash. Probably have to try several different tasks to be fair as well, I guess.

These experiments will reveal things that you need to consider more or less similar to what @ron_horne pointed out.

hogi · Accepted Answer

Invite them to watch this video:

A Dark Tale: Visual Storytelling With JMP® (2021-EU-30MP-792)

Then make them think how many secrets @calking could reveal in your company's data.

And just before they decide to hire him: show them how easy it is to create such graphs and drill-downs on your own in Jmp.

Then Caleb can stay with Jmp and you get the Software :)

Aziza · Accepted Answer

Thank you! Your input is very useful!

Aziza · Accepted Answer

Thank you. A great idea with the comparison matrix!