Keystone for Finance

Make the cost of product data visible.

The software subscription shows up in a budget. The hours spent reconciling its data usually don’t. That gap is the real cost of fragmented product data, and the question Keystone helps you examine.

Saves≈€249K/year net benefit, including freed capacity

Gains≈498% annual ROI · ≈3.6-month gross payback*

* Illustrative model, not guaranteed savings. See assumptions.

See the ROI model All teams

Design maintains one spreadsheet. Supply chain follows up with suppliers. Compliance rebuilds a buyer response. Marketing checks whether a claim is still current. Each task looks reasonable within its department. Across the business, the same information may be collected, corrected and reviewed several times.

That is the financial question Keystone helps you examine: what does it cost to keep the organisation working from disconnected versions of the same product?

Look beyond the next tool purchase

The cost of fragmented data includes more than licences. It can include repeated entry, supplier chasing, external support, correction cycles and time spent establishing which figure is right. It may also delay another activity, such as a retailer listing or a customer response.

ASQ’s cost-of-quality framework distinguishes prevention, appraisal, internal failure and external failure costs. It is a useful reminder that the financial impact of poor information can appear in several places, not just the team that first created it.

Source: ASQ: Cost of Quality

Keystone gives teams a shared product-data foundation. The investment case should identify which work that foundation changes and which costs remain.

Budget for the complete operating model

A credible proposal includes:

The platform subscription and required modules.
Usage charges and expected volumes.
Migration, field mapping and integration.
Training and internal implementation time.
Ongoing administration, support and specialist review.

Compare that total with a defined workflow, not a speculative estimate of every inefficiency in the company.

A business case that can survive scrutiny

Suppose a workflow consumes 120 staff hours per month at a loaded cost of €45 per hour. That represents €64,800 in annual staff effort. An assumed 30% reduction would recover 432 hours, valued at €19,440.

Those are illustrative assumptions, not Keystone performance results. The recovered capacity is also not automatically a cash saving. Its value depends on whether people can redirect it to useful work, avoid additional hiring or reduce actual expenditure.

A shared platform becomes more attractive when the same foundation serves another team without creating another collection exercise. Count that benefit carefully, without counting the same saved hour twice.

Fund an outcome before funding a transformation

Choose one recurring activity with a named owner. Establish its current effort, errors and delays. Agree a bounded implementation and measure the result. Expand when the evidence supports it.

Start with one workflow whose cost you can explain. Build the ROI case from observed work, a complete budget and results your teams can verify.