ROI is always a hard thing to calculate. How do you put an ROI around being more compliant? It is just something that you have to do. If you don't, then you get in a lot of trouble potentially. Certainly, time to market is a huge value. However, doing things in a more compliant way is probably where you will see the value.

We benefit from the managed services that Zudy offers. The fact that it is a low-code development platform really gets us value pretty quickly, which is great from an IT perspective. It really drives a lot of value with our business partners.

The time to value with VINYL and Zudy business partners is probably 30% of what it would take with traditional applications. I think the low-code development platform really gets you to a minimal viable product very quickly, then you can iterate on that very quickly. Between that and having the business partners within Zudy to help drive a lot of these discussions and actually do the development for us, it has really been invaluable.

You get to a high quality application in a very short timeframe and relatively low costs without any measurable incremental headcount. Certainly, you need people to interact with the business and probably people to help point them in the right direction in terms of what APIs or data to get to. We haven't added any real headcount because of bringing the VINYL application into our environment.

We cannot calculate a return on investment now because we haven't started charging our users or promoting the app in general. 

If I had to think about it across the 40 applications, I am not even sure that I can give an order of magnitude. There is not only time and effort savings, but the ability to do something where we simply just couldn't do it. With COVID throwing everyone for a curve ball last March, there were simply things we weren't able to do. We didn't know how to visualize them. We had to stand up a commercial solution to address our sales force's needs. It would have taken more time than we would have wished in order to get our sales force out and selling. So, in addition to the time savings, the ability to enable people with an effective solution where there was really no alternative. Doing this quickly and effectively has really been the key value-add for my company using Zudy.

We have seen ROI, absolutely. Our sponsorship business has seen some great growth, and part of that was just using the tool we built to identify our inventory in ways that folks may not have been looking at it and to scale some of those sponsorship deals in ways that were very manual before. That can be significantly more automated now, so that when a national partner wants to come into play, we can be much quicker and much nimbler, getting those deals finalized. It has increased our sponsorship revenue. We're happy about that.

It's hard to say what our ROI is, but VINYL has certainly helped us. Our investment has been limited and we've gotten good process benefits out of it. I can't really say in dollars and cents, but it's certainly helped us improve rigor and process in a number of areas.

We haven't done the calculations because this wasn't one of those things where I said, "I'm going to go spend this money and then I'm going to save some money somewhere else." This was more about fixing a broken process than it was about trying to save money.

Our ROI on the first release of Vinyl was visible in less than 60 days.

Our return on investment is orders of magnitude more than what we paid for the software. I don't know an exact number, but what I will tell you is that if you look at the cost of the platform, before we had it we would probably spend that much in just one month in inefficiencies in our processes. Being able to clean that up, if you take that over the four years we've been using it, that's a huge return. Even if you extrapolate it out on an annual basis, return on investment is more than 10x.

I would say that we have probably easily had a return of 12 to 15 times more than what we have spent. It's a very solid ROI.

We are able to turn around some applications very quickly.

Our return on investment has been huge. Once we switched from the old platform over to Zudy, we had an increase of organizations to now [have] over 115. That's about 55 organizations that came to us as a result of the platform switch. And in terms of demo requests, we used to get about one or two demo requests a month. Now we're getting about two to four demo requests a week.

VINYL has affected our user productivity in many ways. The most measurable is the amount of time that our field engineers were spending feeding our old ERP system data. I can guess that every FE, and we've got more than fifty in our company, has got an extra hour of their day back not having to deal with the connectivity and all the different transactions that they're doing. The ability to interface with the apps on their phone has made their lives significantly better.

Another thing from an IT perspective, what VINYL has given us is the ability to reestablish confidence in our user base. Our people recognize the difference in VINYL versus before VINYL, and they really, really like the VINYL experience better than anything else they've had in the past.

The VINYL platform with the Zudy development team has allowed us to be significantly more responsive to the business as they come up with ideas or we needed to make process changes. Business process changes are evolving all the time, new markets, new technologies. I would say that the speed of the improvement in iterations is tenfold. We can do things 10 times faster in VINYL than we could in Dynamics AX at a tenth of the cost. Fixes that would take our old service provider weeks and months to do, can take five minutes.

I have seen ROI. The biggest benefits are:

• The speed
• The team's ability to budget
• The team's ability to stay within budget and get things done.
• We are able to experiment, and usually you can't afford to experiment much.

So far, all of my costs have been going into building things. I haven't been able to go live with a lot of the things. We're live now, but just in beta form. The return on investment is going to be hard to express other than the fact that there were three and a half years of not fully wasted development, but almost—I almost chucked out everything we did. After all of the false starts and all of the promises from other people, how do you put a value on that?

I don't have the raw numbers right now because we haven't really started into sales, but all I can say is that it has taken us far less time to build this out than what it has with anything else. And the bigger part is that we actually crossed the finish line. How do you put a value on that?

We have seen a 30 percent decrease in time for some of our workflows.

There is definitely ROI. It allows us higher visibility into our data, which allows us to data-check faster, and validate data that we had not been able to validate, prior. It has definitely saved us money. On a day-to-day level, people are able to do their work more efficiently and that's going to save them time, which is going to save money.

It's valuable for all of us, in terms of our time. It has saved us time.