In all business niches, paying careful attention to the budget is essential for stable growth. Throwing money away on bad decisions can cost quite a lot. For example, hiring a bad employee brings enormous costs to the business. The same goes for making a wrong decision when purchasing a product, be it hardware or software.
When it comes to a bad software product, calculating the exact losses is hard, due to a variety of different factors involved. However, the following are some things that should be taken into consideration.
Cost of the Product
This one is easy to calculate. If the software was a bad decision, its direct cost for your business should be put in the financial loss calculation. If you are using a cloud based product, calculate all the fees you have paid over the period of using the software. This will give you a number of expenses made to run and use this software tool.
However, this is only the beginning, and once you have calculated the direct financial loss for using the tool, there are some other factors that require your attention.
Financial and Time Investment in Employee Training
No matter how easy to use a particular software is, creating employee training is essential. This ensures that employees will be able to maximally take advantage of all the product features. There are two costs you need to take into consideration.
- Financial cost – The expert from the company selling the software who is conducting the training procedure costs money.
- Time investment – You need to put all of your employees off their working position in order for them to learn to use the new software. During this period of time, you will still continue paying them their regular salaries, while business productivity is paused in the whole process.
It is clear how these costs quickly add up and form high financial costs for your business. In fact, the training process is a threefold expense, making it a very big financial investment.
Employee Attitude Towards the Leadership
This is important in all lines of work. People who are going to use the product need to actually find it easy to use and they should view it as a better option in comparison to what they have used so far. If your software or hardware tool fails at one of these things, employees will start developing anger and resentment towards the software. Now, this affects the company in a very important way.
Yes, we are talking about productivity. When an employee is angry or under stress, he or she has a hard time focusing on the task at hand. Furthermore, this attitude is toxic for the office surroundings, and it makes other employees uncomfortable too. The result? A tremendously negative impact on team productivity, reducing the overall business performance.
Another problem that comes up is that employees get away from the product that is getting paid by the company. Not only did the product get utilized for higher productivity, but it has become another unnecessary cost for the company.
Calculating the financial loss in these circumstances is more challenging to achieve, but, the loss is there.
The Stability of the Software Network
A majority of software tools are now located in the cloud, and it is essential that you are working with one that is always accessible. If you are experiencing outages and downtime regularly, you are losing a lot of money. These sorts of problems greatly impair the team’s productivity. Not only does it directly stop the process, but it immediately increases the amount of stress everyone is feeling.
To quantify this in dollars, simply calculate how many employees require the software to work, what you pay them per hour and how long was the tool inaccessible. The longer the tool is offline, the higher the losses.
Creating a precise financial loss calculation when picking a bad product is practically impossible. However, you can make some calculations that will give you the right idea about the amount of money you are losing. Therefore, if you are experiencing problems with a product you have invested in, immediately reevaluate its meaning in your business; it will help you make the change sooner, instead of continuing to lose money.
OneMotion helps organizations choose and deploy software in a way that their teams will actually use it. Ever hear someone complain that ‘they’ve tried 10 different tools and none of them worked’? That’s usually a people problem, not a tool problem and we are all about fixing those people problems. Talk to us to find out more!