Calculating the ROI of Cascade

Overview

The ability to execute strategy efficiently and effectively is paramount for organizations striving to achieve their goals and remain competitive. However, executing strategy at scale, across hundreds (or thousands) of people and the plethora of tools in use at your organization - is almost impossible without a centralized platform that consolidates and aligns your strategic efforts. Investing in a robust strategy execution platform like Cascade yields significant returns on investment (ROI) over both the short and long term. This article and the linked resources will guide you through how to think about the ROI of a strategy execution platform, and build an internal business case for implementing one.

High level ROI drivers of Cascade

At its core, Cascade empowers organizations to translate strategic objectives into actionable plans, aligning resources, tracking progress, and fostering accountability across all levels of the organization. This delivers high level value to the organization across the following facets:

• Alignment: Cascade delivers both vertical and horizontal alignment by translating strategic objectives into actionable plans, ensuring that every initiative directly contributes to overarching goals, minimizing duplication of efforts, and fostering a unified organizational vision.

• Focus: By providing a centralized hub for strategic planning and execution, Cascade helps teams maintain focus by prioritizing tasks, resources, and initiatives in line with strategic objectives, reducing distractions, and ensuring efforts are directed towards high-impact activities.

• Visibility: With real-time tracking and reporting capabilities, Cascade enhances visibility by providing stakeholders with comprehensive insights into the progress of strategic initiatives, key performance indicators, and potential roadblocks, enabling proactive decision-making and timely adjustments.

• Accountability: Cascade fosters accountability by assigning clear responsibilities, deadlines, and performance metrics, facilitating transparent communication and collaboration, and holding individuals and teams accountable for their contributions towards strategic objectives.

• Speed of Decision Making: By streamlining workflows, facilitating collaboration, and providing actionable insights, Cascade accelerates the pace of execution by eliminating bottlenecks, optimizing resource allocation, and enabling quick decision-making, thereby driving faster time-to-market and enhancing organizational agility.

Whilst these high-level drivers of ROI are a useful starting point, they are arguably too conceptual and high level to be of direct use in creating an ROI-led business case for your own implementation of Cascade. That's why in the next section, we've created a more tailored framework that you can apply actual dollar values to for understanding how much value your organization can directly derive from Cascade.

Direct and specific drivers of ROI

The following graphic illustrates how and when Cascade brings ROI starting at implementation of the platform and continuing into subsequent years.

We've broadly broken down the different types of ROI into a series of 'levels' starting from roughly 3 months after the date that you implement the system. The levels are as follows:

Level 1: Cost saves from time and effort spent on strategic reporting & monitoring

This is the simplest and most immediate value that you will get from implementing Cascade. Currently, your organization likely expends far more effort that you realize on tasks such as:

• Creating documents and templates for strategic planning and reporting

• Chasing stakeholders for regular updates on their strategies, projects and KPIs

• Consolidating and cleaning up those updates into a consumable format

• Consolidating data from various sources such as data lakes, BI tools, etc

Cascade all but eliminates these costs through automation and in some cases system integration. Small organizations will usually dedicate around 1 to 2 full time employees for these tasks (not necessarily as dedicated employees, but in some cases spread out over several managers or leaders). That can cost them anywhere between $150k to $300k of fully loaded employee costs, which are immediately saved with Cascade. For larger organizations, the cost save and ROI can be significantly higher.

Level 1 cost saves are usually realized in a very short period of time from implementation, meaning that the full cost of Cascade can often be recouped well within year one of the implementation, on cost saves alone.

Level 2: Elimination of misaligned projects

The second area where most organizations see significant ROI from their Cascade implementation, is in the removal of misaligned, or in some cases duplicative projects. Most organizations find that the process of centralizing all projects and programmes of work into a central tool sheds light on parts of the organization that are either:

• Working on things that are no longer core to the company strategy

• Working on things that are either identical or substantially similar to other projects in the organization that can deliver similar value (this is much worse in larger organizations)

• Lacking in clear KPIs for certain projects, thus making their value to the organization questionable

Research amongst our customer base suggests that most organizations who implement Cascade end up shelving between 3 and 8 major projects as a result of the centralized visibility that Cascade brings. The cost saves from those projects can often run into the millions of dollars, and that's not accounting for the opportunity benefit of diverting those resources to more valuable projects or programmes.

Level 2 cost saves and ROI typically come towards the end of the planning phase of your Cascade implementation, typically around month 6 following deployment.

Level 3: Accelerated delivery of key strategic initiatives

How much would it be worth to your company to deliver its strategic goals 3 months ahead of schedule? How about 6 months, or even a year? It's easier than you think to quantify this when you have a clear set of KPIs attached to every aspect of your strategy. Cascade helps you with the process of creating those KPIs, but more importantly it accelerates your ability to deliver that strategic shift in several meaningful ways, including:

• Better visibility on the progress (or lack of) against strategic goals

• An easy way to reallocate resources to projects and programmes that are falling behind

• Robust data-led strategic health indicators (rather than relying on subjective human assessments of strategic progress

Our third-party validated research amongst our customer base suggests that customers who use Cascade deliver 66% more of their strategic outcomes each year than those who don't. How this converts to cash benefits will vary between customers (our ROI calculator can help you quantify this) but the benefit of this for even small organizations tends to run in the millions.

From a timing perspective, you're likely to start seeing this ROI kick in from roughly month 9 to 12 from the first date of your deployment.

Level 4: Cost saves from deeper operating efficiencies

Whilst Level 3 ROI is related to faster delivery of your strategy, Level 4 ROI relates to the fact that you will be able to deliver the same output as before with lower overall costs - OR alternatively, you can invest the operational costs saved into doing more with the same amount of resources. Operational cost saves from implementing Cascade broadly fall into the following categories:

• Streamlined Processes: Cascade automates and streamlines strategic planning, execution, and tracking processes, reducing the time and effort required for manual coordination and communication. By eliminating inefficiencies and streamlining workflows, organizations can achieve operational cost savings through increased productivity and reduced labor costs. Some of this benefit may be captured in Level 1 ROI, so be careful not to double count here.

• Resource Optimization: The platform enables organizations to optimize resource allocation by aligning resources with strategic priorities and avoiding overallocation or underutilization. By efficiently allocating resources based on strategic objectives and real-time insights, organizations can minimize unnecessary expenses and maximize the return on their investments in personnel, equipment, and other resources. Some of this benefit may be captured in Level 2 ROI, so be careful not to double count here too.

• Reduced Errors and Rework: Cascade provides a centralized platform for collaboration, communication, and tracking, reducing the likelihood of errors, miscommunications, and duplicative efforts. By minimizing errors and rework associated with manual processes and disparate systems, organizations can avoid costly mistakes and operational inefficiencies, resulting in tangible cost savings over time.

• Improved Decision-Making: With robust data analytics and reporting capabilities, Cascade provides actionable insights into the performance of strategic initiatives and the overall health of the organization. By leveraging data-driven insights to inform decision-making, organizations can mitigate risks, capitalize on opportunities, and optimize resource allocation, thereby reducing the likelihood of costly strategic missteps and enhancing operational efficiency.

• Lower IT Overhead: As a cloud-based platform, Cascade.app eliminates the need for costly infrastructure investments, maintenance, and IT support associated with traditional on-premises software solutions. By leveraging a scalable and secure cloud infrastructure, organizations can significantly reduce IT overhead and operational expenses while benefiting from continuous updates, enhancements, and accessibility across devices and locations.

It's fair to say that as you move through the different levels of ROI, things arguably get a little harder to quantify into real cash dollars. That's why we've created the ROI calculator that will ask you a series of questions about your organization and help you to calculate specific and tailored benefits for your own use case.

Cascade ROI Calculator

Download the Cascade ROI Calculator Here - Just Make a Copy!

To simplify the process of building a business case and quantifying the ROI of Cascade, we've built a simple but powerful calculator that you can use as a starting point and customize as needed.

The calculator walks you through a series of questions on topics such as:

• The size of your organization

• How much effort you're currently putting into centralization of strategy

• How data-driven your organization currently is

• How much you spend on R&D

Once you've answered a series of questions, you'll be able to see high level estimates of your ROI from levels 1 to 4, as well as some additional ways to think about ROI that aren't covered in this article.

We've also included an example of the real-world ROI that Cascade brought to one of our many successful customers.