I can't speak to the exact ROI. The head of the EDI has all this information. I do not have this information.

I don't have exact numbers, but the return on investment is pretty good, given that it generates 30 percent of our revenue—around $16 billion—and we only pay for support for the year. The ROI is pretty good.

SEEBURGER BIS increased our efficiency by at least 30 percent.

The investment is the integration with our trading partners. The business processes that go on internally and intercompany, like warehouse transfers and stock control, are a good investment for us.

In general, we have seen ROI, because we have done a lot of consolidation over the last few years and avoided the need for other solutions by using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) as our central integration platform. Over the years, we've migrated around 40 to 45 decentralized integration solutions and saved a lot of money and reduced complexity. We have even improved the services we can provide to our partners because they do not necessarily have to deal in a different way in different regions. They always have the choice based on same service offering in each region where OSRAM is active.

This is less babysitting. In the amount of downtime, we are probably saving money, which is a big thing.

We do not have exact figures for ROI at the moment but the one example, where we take two hours per week down to zero, is priceless right now.

Compared to our previous solution, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is more expensive. But our previous solution isn't compatible with SAP so we would have had to migrate to a solution like SEEBURGER's at some point. It has cost us more money to migrate to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but in three to five years' time, we should start to reap the benefits.

We hope to start seeing ROI by the end of this year, once we start getting more trading partners onboarded. We're paying for a set monthly amount but we have only reached about 10 percent usage. Once we start approaching in the vicinity of 60 to 70 percent usage, then we should start getting an ROI. That's not SEEBURGER's fault, that's our fault, because we're not ready to be at that stage yet.

In terms of manpower, once we start to get some of these more automation processes in place, there could be a one or two headcount reduction in terms of the related tasks.

We realized savings after five years. We needed additional development as well as some minor things that we use in our company that they didn't have in their standard solution. It took us time to understand the product. During those five years we were consulting with them and needed their support to understand their tool. After that, a company should be able to be self-sufficient.

It's a must-have product for us. What we do with it is quite straightforward so we still have the same number of support staff and we haven't reduced costs. It's not increasing revenue either. It's not a reason why a client would do business with us. They do business with us because of our brand, but it's a must-have for us to be able to do EDI with them.

With all the new processes and stuff that we've added, one of the big benefits we've seen is that we've never had to increase headcount. We've been able to accommodate everything. Because of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) our development, and ourselves on the business side, have been able to stand up new documents, new processes, new flows, with a reduced headcount. It's enabled business to handle more of it, as opposed to being an IT function.

The two areas of ROI that stand out:

1. User manual task automation because you're reducing manual time.
2. Two or three pockets of different data integration patterns that were outsourced to vendors over the years for various reasons, so there has been a return on investment there to be able to in-house those integrations from a vendor and save on that vendor cost because you have to pay a vendor to do that integration work. Why not use your own software and do it in-house if you can? 

We've had some ROI. I'm not going to be able to give you any dollar numbers, but as far as headcount in my group goes, we used to have four or five people and now it's just me and one other. We're supporting the same number, and more, of trading partners than we used to. Right off the bat, that's a good savings.

We went from 12 EDI vendors to 300 in a very quick fashion. We have exceeded the estimated ROI with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

We have seen return of investment in terms of how quickly we can deliver.

It saves time by doing things automatically.

We have seen ROI.

We have seen ROI.

ROI comes back to automation. We are releasing people within our own organization to go and do more high value work. This is difficult to quantify for third-parties. Overall, it's an efficiency gain, which is the main driver behind return on investment.

The ROI for this is a very subjective thing to measure. We do have our own model for how we measure return on investment around things, like EDI transactions. However, it is not so simple model as providing a hard number.

We have absolutely seen ROI in terms of processing orders from customers. The automation of processes is the best way to describe our return.

As I said above, the tool that we used to have required those developers. We don't have those developers anymore, so we are saving that money. We have the same number of EDI analysts and they are able to do all the mapping. Because of the ease of use of the tool and the capabilities that the tool provides, we reduced the human resources that we used to need to support the previous tools. That's some money we are saving every year.

In terms of licensing also, it's cheaper than what we used to have. And, of course, the number of EDI partners that we are implementing is also a savings for us, moving any manual customers to EDI.

It's very hard to quantify ROI basically because we don't see the financial aspect it. Our job is to ensure that it is running and that we get the output and whatever is needed from it. But financially, if it was down, the impact might be humongous for our company.

Return on investment for us on this is the greater efficiency.