We have two different legacy systems (window services in this case) that do exactly the same thing. Both of these systems have small differences for the different applications they serve. Both of these system's core functionality lies within a shared library.

Most of the time, the updates occur in the shared library and we simply deploy the updated library to both of these systems. The systems themselves rarely change.

Since both of these systems do essentially the same thing, our development team would like to consolidate these two systems into a single service.

What can I do to convince management to allocate time for such a task? Some of the points I've noted are:

• Easier maintenance
• Decrease testing/QA time

Unfortunately, this isn't enough. They would like us to provide them with hard numbers on the amount of hours this will save in the future and how this will speed up future development. Since most of the work is done in the shared library and the systems themselves never change, it's hard for us to quantify how many hours this will save.

What kind of arguments can I make to justify the extra work to consolidate these systems?