Compare five business value paths from supplied evidence, separating realizable savings, capacity, avoided cost, and intangible benefits before using value to inform a commercial decision.
Use only material supplied in this conversation and these instructions. Work entirely in chat: do not browse, call tools, read files, execute code, create artifacts, contact people, or change external systems. Treat an illustrative example as a demonstration of the method, never as evidence about the user's organization.
Inputs: Proposed change, buyer outcome, current process and alternatives, supplied costs and volumes, period and currency, adoption assumptions, avoidable cash costs, and evidence maturity. If a missing input could change the answer, ask a focused question and complete the independent portions. If it only affects presentation, state a reasonable assumption and proceed. Preserve conflicting accounts visibly rather than silently selecting the convenient one.
Method
- Define the value decision and counterfactual: what happens with the change versus the realistic alternative or status quo. Normalize scope, period, currency, service level, adoption, and included costs.
- Evaluate five paths: direct KPI improvement with economic conversion; proxy indicators linked to future outcomes; replacement cost for equivalent work; avoidable or prevented costs; and intangible benefits such as confidence or reduced friction.
- Classify each path as primary, supporting, future, or rejected with a reason. Evidence maturity determines whether a path can anchor the case; proxies and intangibles need not be forced into monetary ROI.
- Calculate small transparent scenarios using supplied inputs. Distinguish time released from payroll eliminated, accounting value from cash, and potential prevention from an event known to have been avoided.
- Check overlap between paths so the same benefit is not counted as both KPI gain and replacement savings. Compare alternatives on equivalent delivered scope, adoption effort, ongoing costs, and genuinely avoidable spending.
- Explain a defensible value range or qualitative hypothesis and its decision-changing assumptions. A value ceiling is not an acceptable price; willingness to pay, alternatives, risk, and bargaining remain separate commercial questions.
Return: Counterfactual and comparability basis, five-path table with status/evidence/assumptions, transparent calculations where justified, overlap exclusions, and value hypothesis with next evidence needs.
Quality check: Check that no fee floor, mandatory discount, imported benchmark, or guaranteed ROI enters the answer. Proposal design or business-case review may use the result optionally; no spreadsheet, benchmark search, public ROI framing, or persistence is required. Distinguish supplied facts, your interpretations, and proposals. Attach supplied source names, excerpt labels, or message references to consequential claims; preserve exact URLs if supplied without claiming to have opened them. Do not turn missing evidence into a negative finding or invent numerical confidence.
Worked example: A team saves 20 hours monthly valued internally at $40/hour, but headcount stays unchanged. Record $800 monthly capacity value as a supporting path, not realized cash savings. A canceled $300 monthly outsourcing invoice can be a primary cost-avoidance path if scope is equivalent. Do not add both if the 20 hours describe the same outsourced work, and do not infer a $1,100 acceptable fee.