3 MINS – TAKE THE ASSESSMENT BELOW
Is Your Technology Pointing at Growth—or Spinning in Circles?
For CEOs leading operations-heavy companies with complex, moving parts—warehouses, fleets, inventory, and logistics—technology can either be a high-yield engine or a silent drain on capital.
To help leaders pinpoint where their technology stack stands, Compass Left designed The Compass Score™: a 3-minute, 12-statement assessment designed to evaluate whether your operational technology is driving measurable business outcomes or sinking resources.
Here is a walk-through of how the assessment breaks down across three core strategic pillars.
1. North: Direction & Alignment
The first pillar examines whether tech investments directly support high-level business goals rather than just maintaining basic functionality.
-
Clear Value per System: “We can name the business result each of our top 5 systems is supposed to produce.”
Every core application should directly map to an operational outcome—such as reduced order processing times or lower carrying costs—rather than existing simply out of habit.
-
Goal-Driven Budgeting: “Our tech spending plan comes from next year’s goals — not last year’s budget.”
Forward-looking companies build their tech roadmap around future targets instead of anchoring to historical spending patterns.
-
Outcome Ownership: “Someone in our company owns technology outcomes — not just uptime.”
IT management often focuses on server stability and user access. True alignment requires someone responsible for ensuring software drives its intended business ROI.
2. East: Execution & Delivery
The second pillar measures how effectively systems are deployed and whether they can survive team turnover.
-
Predictable Rollouts: “Our last major system rollout finished on time and on budget.”
Budget overruns and delayed implementations signal friction between software design and operational reality.
-
Vendor Accountability: “Our last major system delivered what the salesperson promised.”
Gaps between vendor promises and actual day-to-day utility often lead to unused modules and workaround processes.
-
Operational Continuity: “If our ops lead quit tomorrow, our systems would keep running without them.”
A healthy tech infrastructure relies on documented processes and standard workflows rather than tribal knowledge locked in a single key person’s head.
3. South: Sinking Money & Waste
The third pillar focuses on software redundancy, unused assets, and unmonitored financial leakage.
-
Offboarding & License Management: “We are not paying for licenses of people who’ve left the company.”
Inactive seats and abandoned user accounts quietly siphon off operating capital month after month.
-
System Redundancy: “No two of our systems are doing the same job.”
Overlapping software platforms create fragmented data streams and double the cost for identical functionality.
-
Proactive Renewals: “Our software contracts get reviewed before they auto-renew.”
Auto-renewals deprive leadership of the opportunity to renegotiate tier limits, drop unused seats, or pivot to better-fitting solutions.
Taking The Compass Score™ takes only three minutes, but it offers immediate clarity on whether your systems are steering your business toward sustainable growth or drifting off course.