01 / Commodity
Rent
what is commodity
The model
Rent what is commodity. Extend what already works. Own what is strategic.
Three lanes, applied workflow by workflow. Not a philosophy — a classification exercise with cost, risk and payback attached to each decision.
Every workflow
Classification decision
CostRiskPayback
02 / Almost right
Extend
what already works
03 / Strategic
Own
what is strategic
Four tests
- Competitor would recognise it?
- Platform 80% right?
- Decides price / margin / risk?
- Vendor change would hurt?
Session output
Portfolio map
- Applies to
- Every workflow
- Session length
- 30–90 min
- Output
- Portfolio map
- Bias
- Evidence, not stack
01 / Commodity
Rent
Email, payroll, CRM core, helpdesk, accounting. Common problems solved well by the market. Buy it, configure it, move on.
- Payroll & HRIS
- CRM core objects
- ITSM baseline
- Collaboration
02 / Almost right
Extend
The platform is 80% correct. Extend it with proper engineering instead of replacing it or drowning it in workarounds.
- Salesforce logic
- ServiceNow workflows
- Portals & apps
- Integration layer
03 / Strategic
Own
The workflow is how you compete, price, deliver or comply. Nobody sells it because nobody else does it your way. Build and own it.
- Pricing engines
- Ops control towers
- Proprietary data models
- Customer-facing products
Four tests
How we place a workflow in a lane
Each test is answerable in a meeting. Together they explain almost every technology decision an enterprise regrets.
- 01
Would a competitor recognise this workflow?
If any company in your sector runs it the same way, it is commodity. Rent it. Spend nothing more than configuration effort on it.
- 02
Is the platform 80% right and 20% painful?
That 20% is usually where the money is. Extending Salesforce or ServiceNow properly beats both replacing the platform and papering over it with spreadsheets.
- 03
Does this workflow decide price, margin, risk or retention?
Then it is strategic. Strategic workflows should not be constrained by another vendor's roadmap, data model or licence tier.
- 04
What happens when the vendor changes direction?
Ownership is a risk position as much as a capability one. If a repricing or a deprecation would hurt, you were renting something you should own.
Diagnostics
Symptoms of a misplaced workflow
You rarely need an audit to spot these. They show up in operations long before they show up in a budget.
- Critical processes running in spreadsheets beside a system that cost seven figures
- Per-seat licences growing faster than the headcount using them
- Six months of change requests to add one field to a process
- Two teams reconciling the same data by hand every week
- A workflow your best people describe as "how we actually win" — running on someone else's roadmap
→ Uniqueness of the problem↑ Leverage on revenue, cost or risk
Boundaries
The lane most companies get wrong is Extend.
Replacing a platform is expensive theatre. Living with its limits is expensive silence. Extending it deliberately is usually the correct, unglamorous answer.
01
SaaS is excellent when the problem is common.
Don't rebuild payroll. Don't rebuild email. Don't rebuild a CRM core.
02
Custom software makes sense when the problem is unique.
If your advantage lives in a workflow, a licence agreement is a poor place to keep it.
03
We help you know the difference.
Workflow by workflow, with the cost, risk and payback written down.
We will tell you to keep paying a vendor
if that is the right answer.Our value is the accuracy of the
classification, not the size of the build.
FxBytes engagement principle
What you receive
A mapped inventory of workflows, each classified rent / extend / own
Indicative build and run cost against current licence and manual cost
A sequenced plan — what to leave alone, what to extend first, what to own
Ownership terms: code, IP, environments and exit position
Next step
Find out what to rent, extend and own.
A short, structured conversation about your workflows, your platforms and where ownership actually pays back. No pitch deck.