Pothole Business Case Proof

At the start of the year I blogged on an interesting business case example.

The perhaps slightly unglamorous world of roadway maintenance yielded what looked like a sparkling example of the genre.

Four months on, a remarkable proof has been delivered.

England’s top digger manufacturer, JCB, trumpeted their new innovation’s pothole repair productivity at an astonishing 7-fold improvement.

With the first Quarter’s results in, here’s how one broadsheet headline reported progress;

Powerhouse pothole plugger could end the scourge of crumbling roads

JCB’s new invention fixes six times as many holes in an hour than workmen, and has repaired more in three months than councils do in a year

Then there’s the numbers detailed;

“Since [the PotholePro machine] was first unveiled in January, the company has been trialling it on roads across the country, seeing it filling over 16,500 potholes over the last few months. Councils on average fill in around 10,000 over a year.”

Working out the figures, if this assessment timeframe represents 2021’s Q1, then this uplift is around 6.6-times. Pretty much the launch-touted 7x.

Even if it stretches over the year’s first four months alone, then that would show a fivefold improvement. Which I’m pretty sure, given the hitting-stride ramp-up and any greater geographic spread of initial running that would slow early deployment, make the sevenfold savings simple to envisage for any buyer when they gratefully grab their own machine.

A trio of ‘proofs’ come out of this.

The most fundamental being that some business cases are actually accurate.

I realise that many a seasoned Finance person may scoff at this. Yet not only can we reference such as this everyday tale, but we must endeavour to record our own forecasted Expected versus Actual. Then regale our prospects with a bombardment of their successful outcomes.

Next, the monetary amount of savings is hinted at as elephant-in-the-room. Estimates vary, yet the cost of unfilled potholes is huge;

“the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA), which represents the road repairs industry, now estimates the total cost of the UK’s repairs backlog to be at £10.4 billion”.

Anything that eats into such enormity, merrily chomping away, is surely desirable.

Prospects can struggle with massive values. Yet their personal share can be grasped and ran with to generate action.

Finally, big picture impact cannot be overlooked. Make these front and centre. The insanity of perpetual chaos that can lead to apocalypse can never harm a prospect’s view of your Proposal.

In this case, how’s this for a killer dollop of fear;

“Repeatedly filling in potholes is essentially a failure as it does nothing to improve the resilience of the network.”

How many a solution sell features similar status quo, firefighting preferred flawed thinking?