Hi @Aziza ,
I've had similar discussions with decision-making management where I am, and ROI is definitely a focus of theirs and it's very difficult to refocus that attention. One way you might consider, and one that I have been relatively successful at is estimating the time-saving costs by using the software.
For example, our organization has many different data files containing information that when brought all together brings more value than the data spread out. The process to do this manually would take a very long time, >1 day for each product that you'd want to look at. This process can be automated in JMP, resulting a merging of data that only takes about 1 hr for each product. It still might seem like a long time, but these files are stored on external servers, so the connection speed plays a big role in limiting how fast this process can take place.
In this example, if this is something that is done relatively routinely, lets say twice a month at 8 hrs each time (16 hrs X 12 months) when performed manually, your institute will be paying out almost $7000 each year for someone (each person AND each product) to manually pull that data together. This is assuming the 2080 hrs/yr and an employee overhead of $150,000/yr. Now, if it only takes 1 hr each time (2 hrs X 12 mo), your company is now only paying $1700 a year for the same result, resulting in a savings of $5300 a year. Since ROI are often measured to a three year period, you're company is saving about $16,000. So, would you purchase something for $16,000 knowing you'd recover that savings in 3 years? And that's only considering a single person's effort, and on only a single product. Multiply that by the number of JMP users and products, and now your company is saving a considerable amount of money and the ROI drops fast.
Again, when you consider the number of people needing to use software like JMP within your company, and how the speed and simplicity of using it can reduce the manual efforts, thereby resulting in a quantifiable monetary gain for the company (efficiency), this can help to redirect their focus on why it's a valuable resource to have.
Hopefully this can help you start thinking about things the way management wants to hear things and helps you generate a quantifiable argument that management can understand.
Good luck!,
DS