How to build a business case for Smart Lockers

HOW TO BUILD
A BUSINESS CASE
FOR SMART LOCKERS
A step-by-step guide to impress your boss
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Preparing your Business Case
Step 1. What are your key drivers to implement Smart Lockers
Step 2. Key data to help build your business case
Step 3. Gaining your Smart Locker costs – and benefits
Step 4. Calculating your ROI
Prepare your Executive Summary
Step 1. Prepare your Executive Summary
Step 2. The Power of Persuasion
Step 3. Describe the Situation
Step 4. Detail the Solution
Step 5. Explain the Costed Options
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An overview of how to build a strong
business case for introducing smart
lockers into your business.
This step-by-step guide walks you through
how to determine key drivers for change,
the data you need to collect and how to
calculate quantifiable ROI.
It’s a must read for anyone looking to
improve how their deskside IT support
operates in the 21st century.
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INTRODUCTION
You’ve recognised the potential for Smart Lockers to revolutionise IT support in your organisation.
You’ve done the relevant research and you’re sold on the idea. Now only one obstacle remains - convincing
other stakeholders within your own organisation!
Sound familiar?
If you fit this bill, then read on, as we have created this guide to help you build a business case for
a Smart Locker solution, and make sure it’s the right fit for your type of business.
This guide will help you
Build a compelling business case for implementing a smart locker solution in your business.
Explain the ROI a smart locker solution can deliver.
Introduce an innovative solution that will revolutionise your deskside IT support model.
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PREPARING
YOUR
BUSINESS
CASE
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Your business case will be unique to why
your business is implementing
Smart Lockers.
STEP 1
WHAT ARE YOUR KEY DRIVERS TO IMPLEMENT SMART LOCKERS?
The opening section to your business case should clearly state the reasons why you might implement
smart lockers. These can vary from company to company, but ultimately should address some of the
challenges your business is experiencing.
For example, do you want to:
Depending on what goals your business is looking to achieve, the business case you need to build will
need to demonstrate that through implementing Smart Lockers, the business will achieve those goals.
Make sure the goals you choose align to those of your manager or overall business strategy – there is no
point trying to sell smart lockers to increase customer satisfaction when your manager only cares about
reducing cost.
Clearly, you have a stronger business case if you can demonstrate that you can achieve more than
one outcome. Often a well constructed business case achieves both cost savings and improved
software integration/ adoption, but also less tangible benefits like improving customer service
and employee satisfaction.
Depending on the goals you want Smart lockers to achieve, you will need to research and gather
different data points and information from your business to help build a strong business case.
improve customer satisfaction?
extend your support hours?
improve employee performance?
free up IT support time?
change the way support is provided?
save money?
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Once you know your drivers you can focus
in on the how to calculate benefits.
Do you want to extend your IT support hours?
STEP 2
KEY DATA TO HELP BUILD YOUR BUSINESS CASE
Calculating your ROI
You can build your business case around several areas and calculate your ROI on the parts that are most
important to your business; both qualitatively and quantitatively.
A quick way is to compare the current cost of your existing IT Support service to a Smart Service.
EXAMPLE:
Based on your goals you will need to gather different information, here are some examples of how you can
collect data to help support your business case.
Do you want to improve customer satisfaction by introducing
a frictionless service?
Customer Satisfaction or Net Promoter Score improvement
For some companies, the value of increasing their CSAT or NPS scores, almost overnight, by around
20 points, is enough to invest in this innovative service model. What value does your business place
on Customer Satisfaction?
If you are currently only providing IT support during office hours but want to extend this to outside office
hours, then you need to calculate the fully loaded cost of this additional IT support.
EXAMPLE:
It typically takes five people to cover a single 24 hour shift. Why five? There are three eight hour shifts in a 24
hour period, on top of this you need to add spare capacity to cover for training or sickness/ absence.
If the cost of an onsite support engineer is £30,000, then providing a dedicated onsite 24 hour support
service for a site is £30,000 x 5 = £150,000.
Do you want to improve employee performance by reducing downtime?
Employee Productivity
Quantifying the cost of lost employee productivity is often a rude awakening for companies.
EXAMPLE:
Let’s assume a bare minimum of 1000 IT Request tickets are raised per year, each request takes an average
2.9 days to fulfil, and employees are only 50% efficient during this period, that is 1450 DAYS of lost effort,
or equivalent to 5.6 employees doing NO work for a full year!
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Do you want to free up IT support team time?
Increase Service Desk Capacity
Giving your IT support team more time to focus on important tasks, and automating the more menial,
time consuming tasks is a big plus for encouraging adoption across the wider business.
With Velocity Smart Lockers seamlessly integrating to your own ServiceNow, adoption is instant
and employees can raise self-service tickets directly from their existing Request Catalogue.
EXAMPLE:
‘Ticket analysis shows around 40% of IT Hardware requests will become self-service in the future,
which will release 15% of total Service Desk capacity.’
Increase Onsite IT Capacity
Having skilled IT support engineers act as parcel delivery personnel, collecting and delivering equipment,
is not the best use of their time. Delivery can be up to 30% of an IT engineer’s efforts in a typical business.
You can easily calculate an IT Engineer’s efforts by: Number of Request Tickets per month x
Average effort to fulfil = Time. This time can be quantified further by converting it to value based
upon the cost of an IT Support Agent (i.e. Salary).
Do you want to change the way support is provided to smaller
regional offices?
Regional offices are often supported by either dedicated resources or by expensive weekly or daily trips
to the office by an IT support engineer.
Imagine if all the support tickets could be resolved remotely or by collecting a replacement piece
of equipment from a Smart Locker?
EXAMPLE:
You can build a simple business case by calculating the travel costs or employee costs related to
supporting that remote office, then compare these to the cost of only visiting the same office every
few weeks to restock a Smart locker.
Do you want to save money?
Cost per ticket
If you know your average Cost Per Ticket and the number of IT Hardware Requests that can be resolved
by a Smart Locker, you can quickly demonstrate this solution will deliver a positive ROI.
EXAMPLE:
100 tickets per month, with a Cost Per Ticket of £55 each = £5,500. The average monthly cost per Smart
Locker and service ranges between £450-£800. Depending upon how many Smart Lockers you deploy,
this can quickly begin to save you thousands.
These are just a few examples of how you can gather relevant data to support your goals and strengthen
your business case.
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Looking for a starting point, then take our
quick online questionnaire and we will
send you a tailor-made ROI model or how
much time and money Velocity Smart
Technology will save your business.
How much is the true cost of a Smart
locker solution?
STEP 3
GAINING YOUR SMART LOCKER COSTS – AND BENEFITS
You will, of course, need to know how much a Smart Locker solution will cost your business.
Most likely, you will want to get comparable costs from different vendors to get a better understanding
of the solution and what each provider offers.
However, for added accuracy, it is important that you make sure that you are comparing apples for apples.
To do this, here are three key considerations when making comparisons on pricing:
1. Implementation and ongoing maintenance - Lots of Smart Locker manufacturer’s systems require
you to implement and maintain separate software, which duplicate effort rather than automate or
reduce work. This can mean that a Smart Locker, whilst a great “front of house gimmick”, does not
reduce the cost to serve, in fact it can increase it! Which is why Velocity is the only Smart Locker solution
provider to manage all Smart locker management from within Servicenow, no extra systems
and real automation.
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2. Seamless integration with existing systems – lots of smart locker manufacturers will say their lockers
can “connect to ServiceNow” but in reality, even with an available Application Programming Interface
(API) there will need to be a considerable project to design, build, test and implement a Servicenow
connector, all of which typically costs £100,000-£200,000 to implement fully.
Now you have your costs and savings
its time to calculate your Return on
Investment (ROI).
With Velocity there are no hidden costs, we have invested millions of pounds to create a ServiceNow
app which can be installed in hours not weeks!
3. Hidden Time and Material support costs - Make sure there are no hidden costs which, if not called out
upfront, can end up costing you a fortune. For example, have you taken into account the technical debt
of maintaining an API.
ServiceNow updates it’s software every six months, and end users must stay within two versions of the
current iteration. This means that any in-house build must update their API at least once a year. On
average, it takes 10 days of IT development work a year to stay on top of updates, API development,
security, pen-testing and maintenance. This creates a high recurring cost that would be better deployed
on a guaranteed certified product.
STEP 4
CALCULATING YOUR ROI
Once you have calculated your savings and calculated the true costs of your Smart locker solution,
you can begin to build a Return on Investment (ROI) model.
Here are some examples that you can build into your ROI model:
EXAMPLE ROI STATEMENT
• ROI can be achieved within 14 months.
• £27,000 lost productivity per month!
• Equivalent to having three more staff in our head offices, worth £90,000 per year, at no extra cost.
• 24/7 access to IT equipment for remote offices.
• IT Engineer visits to remote offices reduced by 50%, saving £15K per month.
• A 20% reduction in Service Desk calls.
• Typical 20 Point improvement in CSAT/ Net Promoter Scores.
• Two offices can be converted from permanent onsite IT Support, to a remote Engineer Service
Model - saving 50% of costs or £90k per year.
• Predictable ordering of bulk items to replenish lockers will reduce reactive single orders by
an estimated 15%, saving £5k per month.
• Full auditability of asset life-cycle, reducing misplaced equipment to close to zero.
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PREPARE
YOUR
EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
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You have the supporting data, next step;
writing a compelling case.
Once you have built your ROI model you can now begin to create your compelling Business Case. This can
be in your standard company branding and either a presentation or a word document - whichever will get
the attention of the key stakeholders in your business that need convincing.
EXAMPLE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Why we should implement the Velocity Smart Collect solution in our business:
• Providing replacement IT equipment to employees is an inefficient and expensive process
that wastes time, money and damages productivity.
• Implementing Velocity Smart CollectTM Smart Lockers will automate this process, reducing cost,
increasing productivity, and delivering a better, more flexible 24/7 IT service to end-users.
• The native ServiceNow integrated application makes this system fully automated and ‘zero touch’.
• The growth of WFH and hybrid working makes this the perfect opportunity for change.
• The risk of not moving now is that rivals will gain the competitive advantage.
• Implementation of this project with Velocity Smart Technology can make this a rapid
and seamless transition.
• The business will be future-proofed against all ServiceNow updates, with a trusted and developed
global support network.
• Ensure you include the headline benefits you identified for your specific organisation
as this may be all they read.
STEP 1
PREPARE YOUR EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Whilst it is the first thing in your document, the Executive Summary should be the last section you write!
If this is your elevator pitch to your boss, how can you summarise the problem that you are solving; what
your recommendations are to solve the aforementioned problems (Smart lockers clearly!); the costs;
the ROI; (the list goes on) without first performing your research and explaining each point in detail?
Your Executive Summary is a highly condensed version of all the sections that have been discussed
so far in this guide. On the opposite page is one we prepared earlier.
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You need to know how people
are motivated to persuade them
The situation: what is the problem you’re
solving or the opportunity you are creating?
STEP 2
UNDERSTAND THE POWER OF PERSUASION
The recent revolution in how people want to change their working habits has provided a huge window
of opportunity. Employees are demanding more flexibility and employers must look ahead as to how
they can support working from home and hybrid working models.
However, while it may be tempting to focus on the positives of a business case for implementing smart
lockers, it is also wise to make the counter case against not doing so. E.g. What are the risks of not doing this?
STEP 3
DESCRIBE THE SITUATION
This is where you outline just how bad the problem is that you want to solve. This argument
is strengthened by two factors:
This is predicated on the idea that when it comes to conviction, people fall into two basic categories:
The ‘reward’ “Go-towards-pleasure” people - Those who are motivated by the positive promise of an idea,
and the concept that ‘this will all be great in the future’.
The ‘risk’ “Go-away-from-pain” people - Those who might dismiss the positive case as naive wishful
thinking, but who will respond much better when presented with the risks of not taking action.
While it is crucial to focus on the positive potential of your proposal, it’s a smart idea to always ground
your argument with a reminder of the problems and constraints faced today that might be hindering
your business and impacting your workforce.
1. The statistics are shocking, and clearly demonstrate a serious problem to solve. The current system
is expensive to run, and productivity loss is simply more costly. This is a powerful argument.
2. The experiences have a clear resonance with most people - CEO/CIO/CFO - Board members - IT dept,
as well with employees. Delays that affect productivity are an experience shared by the vast majority
of the modern workplace.
Everyone realises there is scope for change - so you need to make sure you stress this to your advantage.
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Your Solution should clearly show you
understand the true lifetime cost of a
Smart Locker solution.
STEP 4
DETAIL THE SOLUTION
If you’ve made it this far, it’s very likely you’re looking for a Smart Locker solution based on the ServiceNow
platform. Allow us to explain why the ServiceNow integration is so important:
SITUATION OVERVIEW
Why we should implement the Velocity Smart Collect solution in our business:
When nearly all aspects of End User IT have been modernised by digital services, the Delivery and
Collection of IT equipment remains a labour intensive, time-consuming, stubbornly analogue task.
It hasn’t changed in the last 20 years, and it can cost businesses millions.
• The Delivery and Collection of IT hardware requires lots of people, and lots of manual processes.
• On average it takes between 20-30% of End User Computing (EUC) support teams time and money.
• It is expensive to serve with trained IT professionals working as a parcel delivery force.
• It provides a poor service experience - generally only within office hours with partial onsite coverage.
• Reordering is costly.
• Items get lost with approximately 10% of all IT inventory becoming ‘lost’ in cupboards and desks
with no clear itemisation.
• The real benefits of moving to a smart locker system are to be found in the efficiencies delivered
by full automation. This can only be achieved with a seamless ServiceNow integration.
• Without full ServiceNow integration you will still need to employ people to raise tickets and mediate
between ServiceNow and a 3rd party locker management system.
• Full ServiceNow integration leads to immediate uptake by employees, as it deploys software they are
already familiar with and understand, meaning less resistance to uptake, or extra training requirements.
• The real savings are found with a ‘Zero touch’ system operated with a ‘single pane of glass’.
• With the right solution, security will be comfortable because all your company and user data is stored
safely in your own instance of ServiceNow.
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WHY VELOCITY SMART LOCKERS?
Velocity has developed the world’s only “Built On Now” Certified ServiceNow Smart Locker
solution that integrates directly to your ServiceNow
When you deploy Velocity Smart Collect, your company could experience:
Velocity Smart CollectTM is designed specifically for the needs of enterprise businesses and
delivers several high value employee use-cases and automation out of the box with minimal
configuration. Including Item Request, Item Return, Break-Fix, Borrow and Return, Personalised
Stock and Parcel Delivery, plus automated asset life-cycle and restock notifications to make
managing the service a breeze for IT support
‘Built on Now’ is the highest level of certification available, meaning that the Velocity Smart
Collectapp has been subject to the same level of testing as ServiceNow’s native apps.
95% faster asser delivery speeds Up to 20% reduction
in deskside support effort
20+ Point average improvement
in Employee Net Promoter Score
Velocity Smart Collect ServiceNow application means no new applications to install
and saves time for your support teams and users.
Velocity Smart Collect offers the lowest total cost of ownership by proven, demonstrable savings
in support effort and asset procurement costs.
User request time reduced
from 2.9 days average to as little as 60 seconds
24/7 Delivery and Collection solution
of IT equipment and peripherals
Velocity understands the challenge of smart lockers is not just about manufacturing, but the
whole package - analysis, configuration, flexible leasing deals, global delivery, commissioning,
software & API integration, updates and support.
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The greatest advantage of Velocity
Smart Technology is the world’s
only “Built On Now” ServiceNow
Certified Velocity Smart Collect TM
application, which powers our
Smart Locker solution.
Next step; present a range of costed
options which work for your business.
STEP 5
EXPLAIN THE COSTED OPTIONS
Any costs obviously need to be tailored to your particular business needs.
i.e. OpEx or CapEx?
You need to consider whether your boss hates ongoing subscriptions - or will a front-loaded
project cost result in the project being shot down by your CFO?
It’s important to have an understanding of which model is more likely to gain approval in your business.
There’s always a ‘best’ way to finance a deal. Some CFO’s loathe the ongoing expense of a subscription,
and want to make one larger up-front investment in technology, taken from the Capital ‘Cap-Ex’ column
of the budget.
In another scenario there may be a preference for leasing, and for costs to be spread via monthly financing
deals that come from the Operational ‘Op-Ex’ line of the budget. At least 60% of the costs of the project are
up front – if you don’t take a lease agreement – and that could be a big stumbling block.
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LEASING DEEP DIVE: NOT ALL LEASING DEALS
ARE THE SAME
At Velocity, we have built budgetary flexibility into our Smart Locker offering, by teaming up with
industry-leading leasing partner Econocom to offer an array of different leasing options.
Traditionally, leasing companies will only allow you to lease the value of the hardware, and they will
restrict you to keeping your hardware within a single country or region. However, Econocom will allow
you to bundle in the cost of the project, licenses, the support – everything – into a single monthly/
quarterly/ yearly charge for the whole project - so you can choose which model suits your organisation
the best. Is it CapEx or is it OpEx?
What is more, you can roll out your Smart Lockers across your global organisation without being
impeded by the onerous requirements of hammering out a separate leasing deal for each territory
with a separate leasing partner.
Summary: The Velocity difference
You could buy other lockers.
You could choose to build the API
in-house.
You could service and test all the endless
software updates in-house.
You could research and set up
all the legalities of the global leasing deals
in-house.
You could arrange all the logistics of global
delivery and commissioning in-house.
Or you could talk to Velocity!
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uilding
Velocity Smart Technology
16 Red Lion Square, WC1R 4QH
envelope
phone
e: info@velocity-smart.com
t: +44 (0)20 3608 2768