What the formula does
Every month a decision sits in the queue, the organisation either forfeits a benefit it could be earning or keeps paying a cost it could have removed. The monthly value at stake is that run-rate: the saving not banked, the revenue not captured, the process still bleeding money. The calculator multiplies it by the months of deferral. The point is not precision. The point is that "let us pick this up next quarter" gets said in every steering committee, and it is almost never accompanied by its price.
Running the numbers
A distribution business knows its manual dispatch process is costing roughly €45,000 a month in overtime, errors and missed delivery windows. The decision to replace it slips past two quarterly meetings, six months in total. The price of that slippage is €45,000 × 6 = €270,000, more than the €220,000 the replacement system was quoted at. The project was never rejected; it simply queued, and the queue cost more than the decision.
What the total leaves out
The output looks solid because it is a multiplication, but its quality is set entirely by the weaker of its two inputs.
- The monthly value is almost always the softest number in the room, and it is usually produced by whoever wants the decision made. Interrogate how it was built before quoting the total.
- Delay is linear in the formula but rarely linear in life. Some costs accelerate when a competitor signs your target customer or the engineer who understands the legacy system resigns, and the calculator cannot bend the line.
- Waiting sometimes buys information worth more than the waiting costs. A three-month pilot that materially changes which option you would choose is a purchase, not a delay. The test is whether the pause is producing evidence that alters the decision, or merely postponing it.
- A decision that keeps slipping is often a symptom of unresolved disagreement. The multiplication prices the symptom, not the cause.
Where the calculator stops
This is one multiplication with no discounting, no ramp and no probability weighting. It cannot distinguish productive waiting from drift, and it will faithfully amplify an inflated monthly estimate into an inflated total. Use it to force the deferral onto the agenda as a cost, then argue about the inputs in the open.
