ROI Does Not Apply
Return on investment isn’t a useful measure today.
ROI is an industrial age term, applicable to companies that manufacture things in factories. That era is now over. Even if a company manufactures things in factories, that process has become commoditized. When something is commoditized it means that it uniformly goes to market at the lowest possible price. Milk or wheat or nails are sold at essentially the lowest price possible. To sell a commodity for less means operating at a loss.
Commodities are often outsourced, like milk or wheat or nails. Or smartphone manufacturing or IT development. It’s possible for the price to go down, but then it goes down for everyone. That is, if you can get it cheaper in Bangalore, I can get it cheaper in Singapore.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t keep trying to make your atom-based business processes cheaper and more efficient, because if your competition does it and you don’t, then you are no longer a commodity and they are. Your sales will drop because your price will be higher than your competitor’s.
However, as business sage Peter Drucker said, there is no longer any way to differentiate one’s business doing better or cheaper or more efficient manufacturing.
