A tracking business case the CFO can defend.

Tracking programme costs land in five buckets and finance teams routinely miss the last two. The visible costs are hardware (tags, anchors, readers, gateways, sensors) and software (location-intelligence platform, licensing, maintenance).

The hidden ones are integration into your existing stack, change management and training, and ongoing calibration, drift detection and quarterly audit.

A supplier-led quote usually shows the first two and minimises the rest. A defensible business case prices all five with sensitivities.

Five categories of return: recovered labour time (people stop hunting for things), reduced shrink and rentals (fewer lost or duplicate assets), higher utilisation (you buy or rent less),

lower error and rework cost (cleaner data, fewer mis-picks, fewer line stops), and avoided cost of non-compliance (passed audits, fewer recalls).

Each can be modelled per use case with conservative, expected and aggressive sensitivities. Payback depends on your baseline, so we model it with your own numbers before you commit.

Three contractual controls turn an RTLS commitment into a manageable risk. A gate-driven engagement (see the TRACIO Programme Method) gives you written go/no-go decisions at each stage.

An independent architecture lets you swap suppliers without re-architecting. And an independent advisor (see our independence policy) holds the contract, the SOW and the ROI model, not the supplier whose target depends on the deal closing.

Forget 47-line spreadsheets. Boards approve when three numbers are credible: payback period in months, a five-year view of costs and benefits, and worst-case exposure if the programme exits at gate 2.

The TRACIO Programme Method ends every stage with those three numbers refreshed.

For a CFO, a locating programme is capital allocation competing with capacity, systems and working capital. Credible cases share these criteria:

• Five-year cash view: hardware, software, integration, support, tag replacement and change orders modelled with sensitivities.
• Capex vs opex rigour, both paths scored at WACC plus a technology/adoption risk premium.
• Pilot-gated spend: go/no-go criteria written before hardware scale; exit exposure quantified at each gate.
• Benefit attribution: search labour, downtime, avoided purchases, shrinkage, throughput and compliance risk tied to your baselines, not supplier averages.

Supplier pitches optimise year-1 price. SI pitches optimise delivery hours. Big-firm pitches optimise programme theatre. Finance should demand the same TCO workbook from every bidder.

• Integration and internal labour omitted until after contract signature.
• Tag battery and replacement cycles ignored: small assumption changes swing TCO a long way.
• Benefits booked on supplier case studies instead of a production-load pilot.
• Scale-out priced as a surprise: multi-site change orders 2-5× the implied unit rate.
• Adoption risk ignored. Operators work around tags and the KPI never moves.

Industry guidance (including supplier-side business-case writing) is consistent: measure baseline friction first, include downtime and compliance risk, and compare five-year ownership, not the first invoice.

• Provide five-year TCO with tag growth, battery life, subscription escalation and change-order scenarios editable by us.
• What does the business case look like under base, optimistic and kill-at-gate-2 cases?
• Which costs are fixed vs T&M, and who owns integration overruns?
• What data and configuration do we retain if we terminate: open format, not a proprietary dump?
• Are you compensated by hardware or software suppliers on this deal?

We build the board pack as an independent advisor: TCO and sensitivity models, gate economics, and supplier scoring with no hardware or AMR SKU to protect. If the numbers do not survive contact with the plant, we say so before more capital is committed.