A business case that cannot be wrong is not a business case. It is a narrative with numbers attached.
This matters more for a 40-person company than for a large one. A big organisation can absorb a programme that quietly fails. An SME cannot: the same budget was the only budget.
The test is simple: read the document and ask what observation, twelve months from now, would prove the investment did not work. If no such observation exists, the case has not been made.
The four things a usable case commits to
A baseline. The current value of the metric, measured, not estimated. If you cannot measure it today, that is the first piece of work, and it is cheap.
A target and a date. One number, one deadline. "Improve efficiency" is not a target. "Reduce order-to-cash from 43 to 30 days by Q3" is.
An attribution rule. Written before the programme starts: how you will know the change came from this work rather than from seasonality, price changes or headcount.
A kill condition. The observation that would cause you to stop. Programmes with no kill condition do not get stopped; they get renamed.
Which metrics survive contact with reality?
Metrics that are already collected for another purpose, because nobody has an incentive to shade them. Order-to-cash days, first-pass yield, cost per transaction, time-to-close, and defect escape rate all tend to hold up.
Metrics invented for the programme rarely survive, because the programme owns both the definition and the measurement.
How do you attribute value to a transformation?
Use a comparison you decided on in advance: a control site, a control product line, or a pre-agreed seasonal adjustment. The method matters less than fixing it before you see the results. Choosing the attribution rule afterwards is how a programme proves whatever it needs to prove.
What is a realistic payback period?
For process-led transformation in mid-market industrial and services companies, a credible first measurable improvement lands six to nine months after go-live, with payback in eighteen to thirty months. Cases promising payback inside a year usually count avoided cost that was never going to be spent.
What a fundable one-pager contains
| Line | Weak version | Fundable version |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline | "Order handling is slow" | "Order-to-cash: 43 days, measured over Q1" |
| Target | "Significant improvement" | "30 days by 30 September" |
| Attribution | "Tracked by the project" | "Compared against the Basel site, unchanged" |
| Kill condition | absent | "Below 38 days by June, or we stop" |
| Cost | Licence only | Licence, configuration, and 0.4 FTE internally |
The right-hand column is not harder to write. It is harder to sign, which is the point: it is the only version that transfers risk to the person proposing the work.
Who should own the number?
The person who owns the process, not the person running the project. A project manager can report a metric but cannot be accountable for it after go-live, and a metric with no owner three months later stops being measured at all.
In a company without a PMO this is simpler than it sounds — it is usually the person whose week gets worse when the number gets worse. Ask who that is and you have your owner.
Where the money actually leaks
Internal time. Almost every case we read counts licences, implementation fees and hardware, and omits the weeks your own people spend in workshops, testing and data cleanup. For a 60-person company that is frequently the largest single line, and leaving it out is what turns a credible eighteen-month payback into a real one of thirty.
Count it at a loaded rate, put it in the case, and the case survives the first serious question it gets asked.
The same discipline applied to a quarter of delivery is described in digital transformation for an SME: the first 90 days, and the ERP-specific version of the internal-cost problem is in ERP data migration.
Start with the number you already trust
Our digital transformation practice writes the case this way before quoting the work, because a case that cannot be wrong cannot be defended either. Public benchmarks from the Federal Statistical Office are useful for sanity-checking a baseline, never as a substitute for measuring your own.
Related reading
- Digital transformation for an SME: the first 90 days
- ERP data migration: the part that overruns
- What should a Swiss company actually pay for consulting?
Pick the metric your board already argues about. Baseline it properly. Commit to a target, a date, and a kill condition. That single page is worth more than a hundred-slide business case, because it can be wrong.
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