 So 47 Eric says our management is hesitant about the cost associated with SharePoint again I say what no I need to present a detailed ROI analysis showing the benefits like improved collaboration document management and workflow efficiency. How can I quantify these benefits to make a compelling case. It's a pretty broad question Neil go for it. So so cost first is the alternative right what are they what are they using today and what does that cost them. Obviously with SharePoint I'm assuming I'm assuming SharePoint online. Hopefully SharePoint online and obviously there's a cost associated there license wise. There's a cost associated there with each license plus storage plus so on and so forth. But what are they doing today. Like what is there. What is the differential between the prospective cost of SharePoint online versus what they have today. That would be my response to that as a question actually. Yeah. A natural place to start probing for those questions. I think we've all known people or small organizations that have taken the the best of those free apps that we might have out there available to us on the web of an ever note or some type of Gmail based account or some other collection of these cloud services that are very low cost if no cost whatsoever. And they can put together this package that gives them all the tools that they want in that tool set. Great. But when they start to grow that out the complexity of managing all of those different apps comes a bit different. Like think about protecting the organizational assets now having that unified login having that established wall between what is work and what is not work. And when you start to get those small freebie apps or those best in class apps that aren't in like a Microsoft offering or Google Suite offering. Now you're introducing a high level of shadow IT and that's something that some organizations will have no no tolerance for. So I think it's it's very mature that you you assessed return on investment for going to something like your point. But it's not going to just be file storage and news pages or page articles or whatever. It's going to be the whole ecosystem that comes with it. I'm sure others have a lot to say in this front. But a very interesting question. Yeah. So I agree with this because I feel like they're putting themselves in a box only talking about SharePoint because you know they have different apps like they might be using SQL Server reporting services and other third party applications ERP systems and and other manual processes in these other applications. And if they look at it from the bigger picture and then try to say OK we can bring it into one place connect them together automated and then look at it from that picture and then like the cost of all those other apps that they're using for support maintenance licensing and look at it from that standpoint. They're probably going to get a better case of where they are just to get started from all these environments down to one. And then of course the resources that you need to manage all those environments versus bringing them into a Microsoft 365 world. Everything's a trade off of time or money. And I can tell you right now I'm trying to clean up a mess from a very small business where everything was kind of stored in all these different places and bring them together just for regulatory reporting. And it's it's a nightmare. It's you know several probably 100 hours trying to pull everything back together. So architecting it correctly to begin with is the biggest thing. But you know you're you're trading time for money. And if the you know that's the hardest thing to quantify though really how much time is saved. How do you prove that. And that's putting that on paper for the number crunchers is a difficult task. Yeah. In fact there's a comment and there's a comment coming in from LinkedIn about that you know ROI is about time is money. I did a six sigma project on that many years ago just to quantify tangible versus intangible time. And you know where are you now and where are you going. So we do a gap analysis. And whenever we want to try to figure out what ROI is on something we need to understand what pain is it causing us now. Why do we need to change. Because I think a lot of times people come in and say well I want to do this. Well why do you want to do it. What is the pain and what is the the thing that you're suffering from right now that you want to go to something better. And let's look at the difference of where are you here to where are we there. And oftentimes what we find I think somebody even mentioned this. You know if you're using all these other different tools and maybe you're spending money and maybe your stuff is stored in another place that you're spending money on that you're not thinking about. Part of the SharePoint ROI that comes to light afterwards is all of that stuff is out there. We're spending money on other places other subscriptions other infrastructure. Maybe even other employees that ultimately at the end of the day could fold in to then give you value in ROI against what you're paying for. But I think until you know the full scope of what your pain is and where you're going from here to here you can't do a true ROI because you don't know what is it that you're changing from and to. Yeah and ultimately the thing that like you said we have additional ROI once you get into the system think of Excel. People are managing automated processes in Excel right now and they could import it to a SharePoint list and automate that and save all kinds of time. But those are things that come once you're in there. So your ROI will just continue to build once you get there. Right. So we're going to put our from a from an end user perspective. They're talking about that you know the collaboration and the document side of things. And and I would often go in and go just on something as a simple process. And then I've seen it where we've saved a team of eight people literally a day a week. So when you look at that that was 52 days in the year in terms of staff cost on just good collaboration on a document through SharePoint. So if you took that one day a week and you took it eight staff how much was it for eight staff in wages for that one day and look at it over 52 days for it ends up adding up. So I said if you can save your staff even five minutes just to have things all in one place and together look at it how much as the you can go to HR and get the average on an income and you know you don't have everyone's income you can you can break it down and I've even used it where I've pulled together you know sometimes recruitment agencies have or you can look online have a look at what the average income is for a particular role and you can go how many people have I got that is for example you go okay we've got 20 and we've got you know seven that are senior leadership and we've got so you can break it down and I've done this with organizations in a spreadsheet and you go okay based on that income how many people how many hours on average what's the average income and then go if we can save them five minutes just five minutes a day what is that equate to an income and then you can go from there and go okay look at it in terms of the the cost of the licenses and what's the gap in the difference between what we had before to what we have now and I found it just far outstrip even if it was just five minutes by bringing it all together let alone the benefits now Microsoft have got on their adoption site some really good information there's ROI calculators that are actually online as well and on the adoption site you got white papers and go and have a look at Rishi's information around mock-up so that will also really help you too so then there's some great ways to be able to do it and some great white papers out there once you have an automated sorry into the SharePoint ecosphere you automate all of those processes automate your approvals automate reminders I have built for the finance department the procurement department that was in charge of the credit card increases and decreases when people travel they would call them last minute and say I'm at the hotel right now and my credit card won't work and so the the the P card people had to jump on their computers get a hold of the bank up their limit or add hotel to their their account and then they have to remember once the travel is done to turn it all back off and so I built a process that the people can request it and then every morning the P card department gets an email that says these are the things that need to be turned on or turned off in the next two days so they didn't have to put it on their calendars they didn't have to remember and they should not be getting random phone calls and messages those are easy to quantify right there especially the finance department will be able to quantify their own ROI Heather you were going to comment as well yeah kind of back to what Christie was saying and Sherry you were kind of touching on this too from from a time savings thinking of not just only productivity but that keeping everything in one place right so if everything is in SharePoint that you don't have that app-to-app switching that context switching that's happening when you have that it takes longer for the person to get back into that where was I what was I doing that deeper focused work right so you have to think of it from that perspective too that that's harder to quantify then maybe like Kirsty was saying like you know let's see you know how much money are we saving or what's the time and it versus you know that the return on investment the other thing is collaboration when we're touching on that as well the knowledge sharing so if we know that we have this one central place that we're going to to get that information or to share that information and now thinking about teams pretty much you know that's built on top of SharePoint so in anything that we're doing in teams with our files and we've also got our communications and things happening there I know there's some other things that kind of tie into it too but the backbone of it is SharePoint so if you're not investing in SharePoint there's a lot of other things that get impacted by that as well but but I would say the two big things for me is that that focused work and and knowledge sharing because if those files are somewhere that you know where they are but they're not accessible to the other people that need it when you're on a vacation or something else is happening or they don't know what decisions were made and how to find the progress of something in that list you know those are those are key things that can really help it's really is a huge topic you know we we could talk for an hours of webinars on this on this subject matter it's because it's I think ever with the points have been made it's not you're not just talking about SharePoint you're looking at all of your business systems there's a lot of things so there's integrations there is the reductions of other third party tools and other solutions so there's cost savings around that so there's a lot of different factors depending on the scope of the size of your business your goals kind of all of those factors feed into that so you can't just look at a one to one technology replacement you know we have an old internet we're gonna add this new internet it's not the way to look at it