"How do I prove the ROI of TrendMiner?"
The value is usually there. But it lives in people's heads, in emails or in reports that have gone lost in Sharepoint. When the business asks for proof, you end up reconstructing instead of reporting.
In the latest Success Series webinar for Strategic stakeholders, our CSM Lead
Curious to see the full webinar? Check it out here:
Layer 1: Capture at the moment of work
When an engineer finishes a meaningful piece of analysis, they report four things right then:
- What problem it addresses
- How big it is roughly
- Who should validate it
- When it was completed.
Don’t ask them to make a full ROI calculation, just capture enough context to build on later.
Give the size scale some shape (e.g., Large means it affects a full production line or represents an estimated annual impact of €50,000 or more). Use whatever you already have: a field in a shared tracker, a column in a spreadsheet. It doesn't need to be sophisticated, it needs to be consistent.
Layer 2: The value harvest ritual
Once a month or once a quarter, a small group sits together for about 45 minutes: the engineer who did the work, the program manager, and someone from operations who knows the business impact. Together they work through four questions for each captured use case:
- What changed? In the engineer's own words (mechanism first, numbers later).
- Compared to what? This is the baseline. What was happening before, over what period?
- How big is the change in operational terms? Hours saved, tons produced, events avoided. Engineering language, not finance language.
- What is it worth to the business? This is where the translation happens.
One preparation step makes everything easier: agree on a few financial reference numbers before the first session:
- Cost per hour of downtime on your key line.
- Margin per ton of product.
- Value of a recovered batch.
Agree them once, and every harvest after that gets faster.
Add a confidence label to each outcome (High, Medium, or Low) based on how solid the baseline is. A €50,000 saving with a strong 12-month baseline is sometimes worth more in a management conversation than a €500,000 saving nobody can explain.
Layer 3: A named owner with a real mandate
Someone needs to hold the value portfolio as part of their actual job. This should not be a side task! This is the person who keeps the portfolio alive between harvest sessions, maintains the agreed reference numbers, and walks into the budget conversation with the evidence ready.
In smaller programs this is the program manager with dedicated time set aside. In larger ones it may be someone on the digital or excellence team with a cross-site mandate. This role typically makes sense after two or three harvest cycles; by then you have something worth pointing to.