Alinean

TCO Analyst

Helping sales professionals, consultants and channel partners convey quantifiable competitive advantage

Alinean's TCO Analyst solution empowers your sales force, consultants and channel partners to interactively create and deliver credible and customized TCO comparison business cases to prospects and customers. With TCO Analyst, the team can be empowered to make the case for competitive advantage, clearly quantifying why your solutions are superior with lower cost of ownership, higher service levels, and better business impact and agility.

Customized for particular selling scenarios, solution and service sets and offerings, TCO Analyst is designed to uniquely convey the TCO advantages of these solutions, demonstrating your organization's competitive advantage over specific named competitors, or solution sets.

The Alinean TCO Analyst first starts by helping your team collect valuable sizing and opportunity information. Pre-loaded with industry, location and size research developed by Alinean (in conjunction with IDC and Wipro), only data the customer knows needs to be populated early in the sales cycle. This helps to dramatically speed early analysis workshops, and also ease the overall burden of data collection on all stakeholders. The defaults are clearly highlighted, and can be easily replaced over time in more detailed sessions as metric and cost information is researched, creating a more personalized analysis.

Second, assessing the opportunity, the tool automatically configures and recommends a solution to best solve the identified issues. As well, the tool or user can specify options for competitive comparison. The customer or prospect can select any solution options, and then based on the configuration and opportunity, the impact of the solution is simulated to provide a head-to-head TCO comparison between the solutions. The analysis includes both direct and indirect chart of account elements for comparison of not just cost savings, but also service level and business agility impacts.

Third, the user can present the results online in compelling charts and graphs, or create CIO-ready TCO PPT and Word reports, integrating your marketing materials and messages with tool results to create a complete value based proposal.

Features of the TCO Analyst tool include:

• Quick TCO - Information is easily collected from the prospect's team. From this information and using third-party validated research metrics from Alinean (and partner WiPro PSA), a Quick TCO analysis can be developed in 15 minutes or less. From this initial assessment, the team can then commit to dedicate more time to collect additional metrics from the customer, and more precisely assess the impact of the proposed practices, solutions and project.

• Detailed CIO-Ready TCO - From detailed information about the current AS IS business, costs, and opportunities, and using Alinean third-party validated calculations and metrics, a CIO-ready TCO report can be developed in about one hour. Financial calculations include IT and business unit cost comparisons, direct (hard) and indirect (soft) cost comparisons to include service levels and business agility, risk comparison, intangible (strategic) benefits, TCO competitive comparisons. Additional ROI metrics (see Alinean ROI Analyst) can also be added to the storyboard in development if needed to convey the advantages of the solutions.

• Instant TCO Reports and Presentations - By providing answers to simple questions about the current AS IS environment, and competitive solutions, a 5 page executive summary Word report, 15+ page PPT executive presentation, or complete 60+ page TCO analysis report is automatically generated. Reporting supports Word and PPT export so that further customization or integration into other proposals or presentations can easily be performed.

• Customized for Competitive Advantage - Completely customized to communicate your unique cost advantages and value - not a generic TCO comparison. TCO analysis templates developed by Alinean are typically delivered to the field within 6 weeks of project kick-off and include third party validated methodologies, calculations and research metrics.  Customized TCO templates can be developed by porting your existing spreadsheet based models, or having Alinean analysts work with your subject matter experts to create original models.

• TCO Expertise and Credibility - Alinean is the original creator of Gartner's TCO tools. Alinean includes customized third-party validated research from our Alinean Value Base of over 20,000 worldwide companies, and a customized white paper to explain the Alinean ROI Dashboard methodology, calculations and research.  Additional research can be added from TCO research partner WiPro PSA.

• Worldwide selling support - including localized metrics, model content and logic and multiple currency support. Support for easy translation of Word and PPT reports, as well as model content.

• Collaborative Team Selling - On any account, sales professionals, product managers, consultants, partners and customers can be invited to collaborate on the business case. Features and security are enabled based on user profiles and administration.

• Personalization and Auditing - Every metric, assumption and calculation can be customized to reflect the prospects unique business case. Each entry is audited allowing the team to track who provided key information and defend results.

• TCO Comparison Documentation - TCO assumptions are documented to credibly support the defaults and assumptions with third-party references, and highlight the features and benefits of the proposed solution(s) in delivering tangible advantages.

• Standardized Enterprise Wide - Delivers a complete enterprise-wide standard for assuring credible ROI analysis and TCO comparisons  worldwide using one software platform, one interface, one library and personalized content for the entire team

• Connected and Disconnected Operation - Internet Software as a Service (standard) or desktop application (pack n go option) installation with centralized control and synchronization.

• Open Authoring System - your company's own ROI and TCO experts can author or edit their own TCO comparisons or ROI business cases, and easily publish the content for use on a particular deal, or to support the entire team. This provides a method to maintain customized models and capture unique ROI/TCO knowledge for enterprise institutionalization.  No software programming is needed - simply edit and format spreadsheets for import into the tool.

• Usage Reports - With a centralized database usage reports can be generated to track usage (such as which customers the analyses were performed on) and promote adoption.  Monthly overview usage reports are automatically e-mailed to core stakeholders to maintain constant visibility.

• Value Expert™ Certification - Optional customized education and certification class on business value sales tools, as well as Certified Authoring programs,

• Uses the EnterpriseROI™ sales tool platform to deliver an enterprise ready worldwide enabled, standardized, scalable sales tool, and suite.

Benefits

• Engage with economic buyers using compelling TCO comparisons and assessments to create a personalized competitive business case

• Decrease the sales cycle by building the TCO competitive advantage case with the client, rather than having them struggle on their own to create comparison reports

• Reduce discounting and increase deal size by selling TCO, service level and business agility advantages versus feature, function and price

• Improve the credibility of TCO comparisons via third party research and validation, and industry standard methodology and tool-kit

• Reduce the time it takes to develop customized TCO comparison reports from weeks to hours

• Increase proposal success rate by 60%, raising its priority via quantified costs, value and risks

• Competitively differentiate solutions by proving value and cost savings advantages

• Drive channel sales loyalty by providing value added business value sales tools