Measuring savings
If new users take ExperTune up on its free software offer, how will the savings be measured? “We’ll have to draw up a contract that says where the metrics are for any given plant for the last 12 months, be it fuel reduction, scrap reduction or whatever measurements we can agree on,” Gibbs explains. “Then we’ll focus on those measurements and show the improvement over about a three-month period, and then extrapolate that out.” The biggest hurdle, he says, may lie in getting users to provide historical data on key plant measurements.
Gibbs, who joined ExperTune as CEO in mid-July, was previously CEO for SpiritSoft, a London-based software messaging company. He says he is unaware of other software companies that have used a similar “free software-for-shared savings” approach. But “we’ve worked out the numbers pretty closely,” he notes, adding that he is confident that the deal can be a financial winner, not only for potential new customers, but also for ExperTune. “Otherwise, the current [ExperTune] shareholders wouldn’t be very happy with me, would they?”