Dataset entry

TCO & ROI in Modern AMS: Measuring What Actually Matters

ams ams_byte ams-052
AMS cost is not what you pay the vendor. It’s what the system forces you to repeat.

Attribution

Creator: Dzmitryi Kharlanau (SAP Lead).

Canonical: https://dkharlanau.github.io/datasets/ams/ams-052.json

LinkedIn

JSON (copy / reuse)
{
  "id": "ams-052",
  "title": "TCO & ROI in Modern AMS: Measuring What Actually Matters",
  "hook": "AMS cost is not what you pay the vendor. It’s what the system forces you to repeat.",
  "idea": "Modern SAP AMS calculates Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI) based on demand drivers, instability, coordination overhead, and prevented work — not ticket counts or hourly rates.",
  "core_principle": "If you don’t measure avoided cost, you will never justify prevention.",
  "tco_model": {
    "direct_costs": [
      "Vendor base fees",
      "Internal AMS FTE cost",
      "On-call and overtime",
      "Licenses and tooling directly tied to AMS"
    ],
    "indirect_costs": [
      "Business downtime and delays",
      "Manual workarounds by users",
      "Rework after failed changes",
      "Coordination and escalation overhead",
      "Audit findings and remediation effort"
    ],
    "hidden_costs": [
      "Repeat incidents (same root cause)",
      "Knowledge gaps and onboarding time",
      "Emergency changes and rollbacks",
      "Vendor conflict resolution time",
      "Upgrade-related firefighting"
    ]
  },
  "cost_attribution": {
    "dimensions": [
      "Business flow (OTC, P2P, RTR, MDM)",
      "Incident family / demand driver",
      "Change class (standard / normal / high-risk)",
      "Vendor boundary",
      "System or landscape segment"
    ],
    "rule": "Every AMS hour must be attributable to a driver — or it is waste by default."
  },
  "baseline_establishment": {
    "why": "ROI without a baseline is storytelling.",
    "baseline_window": [
      "3–6 months historical data minimum",
      "Incident volume and repeats",
      "Average resolution time",
      "Change-induced incidents",
      "Manual effort per incident family"
    ]
  },
  "roi_calculation": {
    "investment_types": [
      "Problem elimination",
      "Automation and standard changes",
      "Data quality gates",
      "Knowledge structuring (RAG)",
      "Process and governance improvements"
    ],
    "roi_components": [
      {
        "component": "Cost avoided",
        "examples": [
          "Repeat incidents eliminated",
          "Manual steps automated",
          "Coordination loops removed"
        ]
      },
      {
        "component": "Risk avoided",
        "examples": [
          "Fewer P0/P1 incidents",
          "Lower audit exposure",
          "Reduced regression probability"
        ]
      },
      {
        "component": "Capacity freed",
        "examples": [
          "Hours shifted from Run to Improve",
          "Reduced onboarding time",
          "Lower reliance on scarce experts"
        ]
      }
    ],
    "simple_formula": "ROI = (Cost Avoided + Risk Avoided + Capacity Value) / Investment Cost"
  },
  "effectiveness_metrics": {
    "stability": [
      "Repeat incident rate trend",
      "Change-induced incidents",
      "Error budget burn rate"
    ],
    "efficiency": [
      "Cost per resolved business impact",
      "Average effort per incident family",
      "Standard change ratio"
    ],
    "learning": [
      "Knowledge reuse rate",
      "Automation hit rate",
      "Onboarding time reduction"
    ],
    "trust": [
      "Pre-request engagement rate",
      "Decision adoption rate",
      "Emergency request trend"
    ]
  },
  "result_evaluation": {
    "short_term": [
      "Stability improvement within 1–2 quarters",
      "Visibility of real cost drivers",
      "Reduction in chaos and escalations"
    ],
    "mid_term": [
      "Downward TCO trend",
      "More capacity for prevention",
      "Fewer urgent changes"
    ],
    "long_term": [
      "Predictable AMS spend",
      "Lower SAP lock-in cost",
      "AMS recognized as decision partner"
    ]
  },
  "decision_support_with_numbers": {
    "rules": [
      "Always show do-nothing baseline cost.",
      "Use ranges, not false precision.",
      "Separate delivery cost from run cost delta.",
      "Make assumptions explicit."
    ],
    "example_statement": "This automation costs ~X once, reduces ~Y hours/month, pays back in ~Z months, and lowers regression risk in OTC pricing."
  },
  "automation": {
    "copilot_moves": [
      "Attribute AMS effort automatically to cost drivers.",
      "Estimate avoided cost from eliminated repeats.",
      "Simulate ROI scenarios for prevention vs delay.",
      "Generate CFO-ready TCO/ROI summaries."
    ],
    "outputs": [
      "AMS TCO dashboard",
      "ROI-by-initiative table",
      "Cost avoidance trend report"
    ]
  },
  "anti_patterns_to_kill": [
    "ROI based only on vendor rate reduction",
    "Counting closed tickets as value",
    "Ignoring cost of instability",
    "One-off savings without sustainability"
  ],
  "design_question": [
    "If we stop this initiative today, which costs will immediately come back?"
  ],
  "meta": {
    "schema": "dkharlanau.dataset.byte",
    "schema_version": "1.1",
    "dataset": "ams",
    "source_project": "cv-ai",
    "source_path": "ams/ams-052.json",
    "generated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "creator": {
      "name": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau",
      "role": "SAP Lead",
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "attribution": {
      "attribution_required": true,
      "preferred_citation": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau (SAP Lead). Dataset bytes: https://dkharlanau.github.io"
    },
    "license": {
      "name": "",
      "spdx": "",
      "url": ""
    },
    "links": {
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "contact": {
      "preferred": "linkedin",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "canonical_url": "https://dkharlanau.github.io/datasets/ams/ams-052.json",
    "created_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "updated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T15:29:02+00:00",
    "provenance": {
      "source_type": "chat_export_extraction",
      "note": "Extracted and curated by Dzmitryi Kharlanau; enriched for attribution and crawler indexing."
    },
    "entity_type": "ams_byte",
    "entity_subtype": "",
    "summary": "AMS cost is not what you pay the vendor. It’s what the system forces you to repeat."
  }
}