The 'big three' considerations when it comes to researching, evaluating, and purchasing software are price, cost, and return on investment (ROI). During this process there are some easy answers and some complex answers, but AVAIL has solutions to help you decide what to consider when vetting our platform.
Price
Luckily, this is the easiest one - it’s actually right on our website! The price of an AVAIL license is $200 per user, per year. That’s actually the highest price too. The price per user of a multi-year, Enterprise license scales down as the number of users scales up.
Take your technical users and multiply that number by $200 - that’s the max annual price of an AVAIL license. We find it to be ~5-10% of your AutoDesk bill.
Cost
Now, the good stuff. Cost and price are different, as cost can be harder to quantify and encapsulates several variables. In considering the cost of AVAIL, we’re now thinking about human capital, legacy tools, and the problem set you’re trying to solve. Let’s start with the problem set:
Understanding the cost of the problems you’re trying to solve is the key to the equation. If you don’t know the cost of poor content practices, siloed data, or incoherent content strategies, then the price of AVAIL will appear high and the ROI unachievable. Frankly, you can just stop reading this and come back once those costs are understood. Our best customers have surveyed their peers and user groups (with or without our help), or made some conservative assumptions to gather data and formulate their baseline costs, so don’t feel pressure to be exact. Just have some rational basis.
***As a key aside: By completing this exercise, you now also understand the cost of inaction. This is a huge deal when it comes to justifying the expense for a first time acquisition or switching providers.***
Human capital is a real cost and can’t be overlooked. Firms are stretched to the limits when it comes to evaluating and implementing new tools. The catch-22 of an efficiency-based workflow tool is that a lot of people feel like they don’t have the time to implement that which is supposed to help them save time. Good news - we have two different ways to approach this:
1. We can do it with you in a consultative way, or
2. We offer free, regular training on our product
Our recommendation is actually to do both. There’s a bit of cost here, but we will help you get started and then you can take over. We’ve been working with top firms all over the world for four years now and our technical team has learned a few things about getting people going fast. We like to share this knowledge, too.
The next major hurdle is what to do about legacy content management systems (if they exist). Switching costs are real, but we’re practiced at helping firms move away from their old providers. We have functionality built into the AVAIL platform that allows you to move meta data around in bulk through CSV files. We can also design customized training agendas around your calendar in order to get your user bases transitioned to a new interface in a seamless way. Again, this is an area where our technical team has a lot of practice.
ROI
ROI is likely the first and last question when considering new software acquisitions, and we can’t stress this enough: Without understanding the cost of the current environment, it is not possible to make this calculation without calling it a “guess.”
Sample ROI and/or payback in AVAIL is quick based on two simple ideas:
1. Easy access to standardized content saves time. Even 5-10 minutes per person, per week can equate to payback periods of 6-8 weeks. As stated above, the price of AVAIL is actually low.
2. AVAIL’s advanced functionality - Harvest and Stream - drive unique capabilities that keep the platform up to date at all times (with minimal human intervention), as well as serve new ways to manage and distribute Revit content across the firm.
Just these two points alone will allow AVAIL to pay for itself less than six months after implementation.
Scalability is the next big factor to consider when calculating ROI in AVAIL. The AVAIL Desktop is totally file-type agnostic (as well as location agnostic) so firms can grow AVAIL use into other file types/departments over time. Think about legacy systems like Digital Asset Managers that the marketing department uses - they’re expensive and can be confined to small teams. Our customers are dropping them and implementing AVAIL. This strategy can typically pay for nearly ⅔ of the cost of an AVAIL license, not to mention “shrinking the stack.”
We encourage everyone to pull back when considering what content management has been, and now, what it could be. Take a systems approach and you’ll see that there are early opportunities to drive value and fast payback - like easy access to Revit content - and then significant money-saving opportunities to scale AVAIL and move off other platforms.
Thanks, but what now?
AVAIL’s customer base represents different sectors of the global AECO industry and is spreading across every top firm list available.
Most importantly, we have programs, staff, and workflows that will help you get AVAIL off the ground and returning results in a demonstrable way.
So, what now? Reach out!
We can talk through the various scenarios presented above, and if you’re ready to implement, then we’ll get going. If the timing is not quite right, then we’ll at least have a better understanding of the steps that can occur. After all, it’s time we’re after.