What’s the real ROI of OpenAsset DAM and Shred? A framework for AEC champions

The business case runs through your head long before anyone asks for it. You’ve watched your team stop hunting for project photos across three shared drives. You’ve seen a proposal that should have taken a day drag on for three. You know what digital asset management (DAM) software or proposal writing software like OpenAsset DAM and OpenAsset Shred are worth.

But inevitably, a decision-maker or innovation committee is going to ask you for a hard number: What is the ROI? And how does it compare to the eight other projects we’re considering? And “it saves us time” isn’t going to cut it.

Leading marketing for the past 4 years at OpenAsset, I’ve seen this play out with our customers across hundreds of AEC firms. The one who believes most strongly in the investment often isn’t the one who writes up business cases or calculates project ROIs for a living. These champions know they’re tired of unorganized workflows and long hours digging through 20 versions of the same photo, but they still have to convince the rest of the team to do it. 

For example, one construction firm we work with had a team member who knew inconsistent proposals and time lost searching through Dropbox was causing the firm to miss out on $100M+ in project RFPs, and that OpenAsset would help. But, to get leadership on board, they had to build a detailed business case around how faster RFP turnarounds and more consistent submissions could accelerate the firm’s growth goals. 

OpenAsset DAM gives AEC marketing and business development teams a centralized library of project photography, CVs, and past proposal content. And with the release of Shred, you now have an AI layer that surfaces the right material from that library for every new RFP response. Using both of these tools, I’ve watched companies shave entire days off of their proposal time. 

As soon as OpenAsset is in your hands, you’ll start seeing the ways it can transform your proposal pipeline. But before you can get there, you have to find a way to turn all those intangible, time-saving benefits into a real dollar value you can show a decision-maker.

Here’s how you do that.

The basic formula

You have two angles to attack from: reduced expenses and increased revenue. You’re potentially familiar with calculating ROI from the former:

ROI (time savings) = (Total hours recovered per year × Fully-loaded hourly rate) ÷ Annual platform cost

However, you should also examine the potential for improved revenue. The entire point of productivity software is to save you time. Most often, when a company saves time by improving productivity, it doesn’t necessarily mean their team should be expected to produce more volume, especially if they’re already stretched thin. It means team members who were previously bogged down with busywork are now free to do things like build relationships, work on strategy, and improve the quality of their deliverables. 

This can unquestionably boost your revenue — and often boost it more effectively than simply increasing volume — but it can be tricky to calculate exactly how, as it relies on several intangible variables. However, you can start by looking at how many opportunities you lose on a yearly basis due to a rushed, overworked team overlooking details. 

How many bad-fit opportunities were hurriedly flagged as a “Go”, and consequently had hours sunk into it that could’ve been used on a better-fit pursuit? How many good-fit opportunities were lost because no one had time to polish the proposal to perfection before deadline? You can even look at opportunities that were lost because no one had time to keep in touch with the client or invite them to an award show. 

Consider how much your win rate and overall revenue would increase if these gaps were closed, and more time was spent nurturing pursuits that truly move the needle. Odds are, these hard-to-quantify gains add up to a big boost on your bottom line. 

How to figure out how much time you’ll save

There is one detail that complicates all this math: How do you project how much time you will actually save before you even have the product? Particularly with a product like OpenAsset DAM, where different customers experience different time savings based on their own personal challenges and adoption methods?

I’ve seen customers reduce their time spent per proposal by up to ~30%, but not all customers’ situations are made equal. Everything from the size of your media library to how eagerly the team adopts OpenAsset DAM can affect that number. You could plug that 30% number in as a best-case-scenario and see what the ROI is, or pick a more conservative number.

You could also work backwards and calculate what percentage of time saved would be required to meet the ROI your company needs. If you can go to your company and say “look, even with just a 15% improvement in productivity, we’d be breaking even, and OpenAsset has the potential to do double that,” that’s a pretty compelling argument.

What’s the ROI on OpenAsset Shred?

While you’re calculating OpenAsset DAM’s ROI, you should also take the time to consider the ROI on OpenAsset Shred. Shred is the “next step” after the DAM. Once you’ve assembled a well-organized library, you can add on Shred, which is designed to automatically pull assets from that library instantly to help you parse RFP requirements, draft proposal content, evaluate go/no-go decisions, and build proposals using suggestions from your past winning proposals.

On top of the DAM, Shred is credited with even further productivity gains by many clients who opt to use it. Take one example from Thomas & Hutton, who used Shred to shave days off of their proposal assembly time. With 80 years of history and thousands of proposals under their belt, Thomas & Hutton had a massive legacy of past success and already-finished materials to draw from.

Shred helped them navigate that massive library in hours when it used to take them days. Their marketing & pursuits manager discovered they were finishing 80% of their proposal research in 50 minutes or less — a process that used to take a full week. Those are the type of time savings Shred can provide.

You can calculate Shred’s ROI separately from the DAM, or look at them as a packaged, platform deal, but you’ll likely get the most accurate numbers by looking at them together. While Shred is a separate product that can operate on its own, it works best built on top of the DAM. 

Other ways to champion OpenAsset to your decision makers

Whether you need something to explain the ROI calculations you’ve made or just want to have extra talking points in your back pocket, there are a ton of ways to express ROI beyond a single hard number. Over the years, our clients have adopted OpenAsset for numerous reasons, many of them far more subjective than an ROI comparison. Here are some of the ways they’ve done it.

Discuss OpenAsset with your industry peers

The AEC industry is a very social one. You probably already know plenty of competing firms just by existing in the same spaces. You may not have OpenAsset, but you may well know someone who already does.

If you end up meeting with them at a conference or trade show, make a point of asking about their real experiences using OpenAsset in the field. You’ll get an honest take and likely a few anecdotes you can bring back to your decision team or innovation committee. Anecdotes like this one from Willmeng Construction, who calculated they got 30+ hours back every proposal thanks to OpenAsset. By the end of the year, that had translated into over 2,000 hours saved.

If that isn’t an option, you can also look at our library of case studies to see similar stories about how OpenAsset has already helped other companies save time.

Assemble pain points

Your biggest pain points are the same places you’ll find the most time savings when calculating your ROI. Sometimes, it may be difficult to talk about these areas of friction in terms of how many hours you’re currently losing every week. But it’s always possible to talk about how frustrating and inefficient they are.

Pain points I see all the time, as expressed by your peers, include:

Asset search time

 “We started keeping track of how much time it was taking to find photos. If it took an hour to resize some photos, or if it took half an hour to find a photo, we recorded it in a spreadsheet. We did this for a couple of months, and I mean, we knew it was a lot of time, but even we were surprised by how much time we were wasting finding and resizing images. Projecting that out with our hourly rates, we calculated that OpenAsset would pay for itself in the first year.” 

– Laurie Strickland, Director of Marketing, Nitsch Engineering

Manual asset-building time

 “Without OpenAsset, I’m certain it would have taken twice as long for mockups — as I would have spent a large amount of time resizing images, and then would have had to make those images available to our web developer in a duplicated directory.” 

— Kristine Svelha-Brown, Graphic Designer, The Magnusson Klemencic Associates Team

Compliance and legal liability

“One of the biggest risks associated with the way we managed photos was making sure that employees weren’t using photos improperly. For example, we didn’t want to damage relationships with photographers by utilizing images that we didn’t have the rights to use, or assume legal risk by using site photos that aren’t safety-approved. It was really becoming a liability to use photos improperly.” 

– Mary Norton, Marketing Manager, Sundt Construction

Consistency

“Demonstrating that OpenAsset would provide an intuitive and repeatable way to improve the consistency of asset selection was a contributing factor in selling OpenAsset as the right DAM solution.” 

— Adam Hunter, Associate — Digital Asset Manager, LMN Architects

Which ROI argument works for which economic buyer type

You can also try to tailor your argument to your audience. No two companies have the exact same structure, but many of them can be grouped together as different types of “economic buyers” (EBs).

The right argument often depends on how your EBs and the business think about marketing and growth in general, not on which one is objectively stronger. You have to always speak the EB’s language. Different job roles are trained to look at a situation differently, or have their own specific priorities they focus on. Here’s the best way to communicate with each one in their own language.

• Managing partner or principal: Win-rate and pursuit-capacity. Partners think in terms of work won. Lead with additional pursuit capacity and the one-extra-win argument; connect proposal quality to competitive differentiation. Avoid leading with marketing efficiency, which reads as overhead to most principals.
• CFO or finance-focused EB: Time-savings calculation with hard-dollar labor values. Show the fully-loaded formula with your firm’s specific numbers. CFOs respect math they can verify. A three-year total cost view helps if the platform contract is multi-year.
• Innovation committee: Peer-validated ROI data from comparable firms. Offer to arrange a reference call with a firm of similar size and practice area. Risk mitigation language helps here: OpenAsset serves more than 1,000 AEC firms and holds a 99% customer renewal rate across that base.
• “Marketing isn’t a revenue driver” EB: Proposal throughput argument. Don’t argue the point directly. Reframe the investment as business development infrastructure or backup into revenue: you’re not buying marketing software, you’re investing in the firm’s ability to compete for more work, more efficiently. Proposals submitted per year is a BD metric, not a marketing one, and most principals track it.

Calculate your firm’s ROI: fill in your numbers

Fill in this table with your firm’s specific inputs. A completed version is a document you can share directly with your leadership team.

Remember, the formula is:

ROI (time savings) = (Total hours recovered per year × Fully-loaded hourly rate) ÷ Annual platform cost

Input	Benchmark	Your firm
Proposals submitted per year	Varies by firm	_____ proposals
Hours saved per proposal	10–30 hours (varies by firm size and prior workflow)	_____ hours
Asset search hours saved per year, whole team	Estimate  weekly and multiply: 3 hours a week across the team is roughly 150 hours a year	_____ hours
CV and resume rebuild hours saved per year	Varies by firm	_____ hours
Fully-loaded hourly rate	$65–$90/hour for AEC marketing roles*	$_____ /hour
Annual platform cost	Request a quote from your account team	$_____
Total hours recovered per year	Proposal time + search time + CV time	_____ hours
Value of recovered time	Total hours × Rate	$_____
Time-savings ROI multiple	Value of recovered time ÷ Platform cost	_____x

* Average salary of AEC marketing roles is based on based on typical AEC market rates we see across the firms we work with, as well as the SMPS Salary survey for 2023 and 2024. 

Get a sales rep involved before you decide to buy

Just because you’re talking to a sales rep doesn’t mean you have to buy. Having someone intimately familiar with the product can help you figure out what your ROI looks like quickly.

This is also important because OpenAsset’s cost scales based on the size of your company. A sales rep is necessary to figure out how much OpenAsset costs, which is a vital component of any ROI equation.

Frequently asked questions about OpenAsset and Shred ROI

How long does it take to see ROI from OpenAsset and Shred?

Most firms with a reasonably organized project library and solid adoption will see an ROI from OpenAsset by the end of year one, but it will be a little different for each company. 

Data quality is important, doubly so with Shred. The cleaner your starting state, the faster you see results. 

There is also the human element: A marketing team that is excited about OpenAsset and well-trained on using it will adopt it much more quickly than one that isn’t.

What if my EB says marketing isn’t a revenue driver?

Switch arguments. Reframe the investment as business development infrastructure: the tool that lets your team pursue more opportunities with better materials in less time. Lead with proposals submitted per year as a business development metric, tie one additional win to the platform’s annual cost, and let the math make the argument.

How do I calculate ROI if we don’t track our win rate?

A rough count is enough. How many proposals did you submit last year, and how many became projects? You’re illustrating the revenue potential of one or two additional wins per year. Most managing partners have a gut sense of their win rate even without formal tracking.

Is there published customer evidence I can share with my innovation committee?

Yes! OpenAsset publishes case studies covering why firms switched and what changed after they did.  For a peer reference (a firm of similar size and practice type), your OpenAsset account team can arrange a call. For most innovation committees, a peer conversation carries more weight than vendor-produced content.

The business case is yours to build

Everybody has insight into how their job could be made easier. The hard part is convincing other people to see it your way, too.

OpenAsset’s value is immediately understandable to anyone working in the trenches. You know how much time you spend trying to find assets — or worse, rebuild or resize something you already know exists. With these tips, you can make the rest of your company understand too.

If you want to start building the business case for OpenAsset at your company, get in touch with us, and we can help you work through the process of calculating your ROI today.