I recently did an analysis of the Fortune 1000 companies - the largest companies by revenue in America, which include industry stalwarts like Exxon-Mobil, General Electric, AT&T, Cardinal Health, Home Depot, Dell, and others. The list that I received consisted of the names of these companies, their 2008 revenues, 2009 profits, whether they are an SAP customer, and whether they are a Winshuttle customer. The goal of my analysis was to see any systemic trends that I might observe within SAP customers and Winshuttle customers.

A section of this list that I received is shown below:

Now, using my favorite Business Intelligence tool (Excel!), I first calculated the profit margin of these companies (profits/revenue) and created a pivot table of this data and found several interesting things. First the fairly obvious conclusions:

1. 2008 was pretty bad year for most of these companies. The average profit margin for all companies was 0%!

2. SAP is used in 46% of these Fortune 1000 companies. There is still room for SAP to grow into these large companies!

3. Winshuttle software is used in only about 15% of these large SAP companies. There is a lot of room for Winshuttle to grow!

And now, the more interesting conclusions -- see part of my pivot table here:

1. On an average, SAP customers were more profitable than the non-SAP customers. The average profit margin for SAP customers was 2% while the average for non-SAP customers was -1%. Even though the difference was not much, the difference was statistically significant based on the large sample size.

2. On an average, Winshuttle + SAP customers were more profitable than SAP customers who do not use Winshuttle software.  The average profit margin for Winshuttle's SAP customers was 3% while for other SAP customers was 1%. Because the sample size of the Winshuttle customers is not very large (N=50), this difference, while present and obvious was not statistically significant.

So, based on this data, we can conclusively say SAP customers are more profitable than non-SAP customers. And it appears that Winshuttle SAP customers might be more profitable than other SAP customers; and when we have more data we would be able to say that more conclusively! Considering the amount of money that Winshuttle customers save in reduced data entry costs and reduced IT costs, these results were not surprising to me.

What do you think of this analysis? Feel free to contact me if I can provide more details.