For the CEO and CFO of a machine builder
How does a customer portal pay off?
You give your customers everything that belongs to the machine. None of that sells anything. So your CFO is right to ask how it pays off.
- $33per machine per year is enough for the information portal to pay for itself.
- 34 monthsuntil the portal with a parts shop pays off at $100M in revenue.
- about 10%of your revenue is spare parts. That is where the money is.
The answer
From information portal to new business: four stages.
- Stage 1
Inform
Everything about the machine in one place. It saves time and replaces what you pay today for catalogs, printing and an old portal.
- Stage 2
Meet your obligations
If you sell into the EU: Machinery Regulation, CRA, Data Act. You have to do this anyway. The only question left is how.
- Stage 3
Earn money
Sell more spare parts and automate service. That brings margin and relief without new hires.
- Stage 4
New business
The machine delivers data. That turns into digital services and predictable service revenue. The potential here is the largest and the evidence the thinnest.
There is no reliable percentage. You can still do the math: At $100M in revenue, the portal with a parts shop needs 4.6% more parts revenue. At $50M, it needs 9.2%.
If the numbers do not work for you, that is not yet a no. Start smaller and decide deliberately how much you can afford to lose. The paper shows how much that is.
From the paper
How little is enough, and what really goes away.
What the portal must bring per machine per year.
To pay for itself in 36 months. Example with $100M in revenue.
- Information portal$33or 0.6 hours of workCost $65,200 a year, break-even $106,400 a year
- With parts shop$58or $144 added revenueCost $114,100 a year, break-even $184,000 a year
- Plus Service Brain$86or $216 added revenueCost $175,600 a year, break-even $276,300 a year
For comparison: In the example, each machine brings about $3,100 in parts revenue per year.
Of 100 requests, about 7 go away.
Depending on the company, 3 to 11. That is why we do not calculate with 50.
- requests100All requests to your service team
- reach the portal26Usage 20 to 30%
- are resolved there7About one in four is fully resolved
We count only what really goes away. The paper shows money and freed-up time separately.
The full paper, 17 pages.
With the math and all sources. To read and pass on, no sign-up.
Each stage calculated separately, with examples for $50M and $100M in revenue.
The five questions your CFO will still ask, with the worst case and the question: What if we do nothing?
Where the evidence is missing, and all sources to check.
Download the paper PDF, 3.1 MB
45 sources to check
Five from the list. Where no clean measurement exists, the paper says so.
- [9] McKinsey, How aftermarket service providers can meet new customer expectations, 2025, n = 250
- [10] Gartner, press release, 2024, n = 5,728, across industries
- [17] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026
- [21] Flyvbjerg and Budzier, Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think, Harvard Business Review, 2011
- [34] Brynjolfsson, Li, Raymond, Generative AI at Work, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2025
Run it with your numbers
In a workshop, we use our ROI calculator to work out your business case together with you. Gerd Bart will get back to you personally.
Thank you. Gerd Bart will get back to you.
That did not work. Please write to gerd.bart@transaction-network.com.
The machine is down
After the math comes the game.
In the paper it is a number. Here you experience it: A machine is down, your customer finds the cause, asks your service team and orders the original part. Eight steps with sample data, no sign-up.