Step Three - reviewing the costs
The real costs of investing in records management and an EDRM solution will include some or all of the items listed in the following table. Costs:
Project management (internal and consultancy) costs
Information gathering and analysis (internal and consultancy) costs
Records management tool development (internal and consultancy) costs
Records management strategy implementation (internal and consultancy) costs
EDRM specialised hardware costs
EDRM standard software costs
Infrastructure upgrade costs
EDRM implementation core service costs
EDRM additional services costs
Contingency costs
The costs should be quantified and divided into one-time capital costs and ongoing revenue costs. The one-time costs go into the model as the initial system costs. The ongoing costs are balanced against the ongoing system savings to arrive at an overall figure for ongoing system savings.
The project management costs would include the costs of third party consultancy support plus the internal project team costs. The project management resource requirements for each stage of the toolkit are provided in the toolkit.
There are very few specialised hardware costs today. If you have a large document capture requirement there will be significant scanner costs and if you are capturing high volumes of document images or other multimedia content you will have some significant initial storage costs although these should be offset over time by a significant reduction in the number of duplicate e-mails and electronic content files stored on existing servers.
The software costs are sometimes hard to define as different suppliers have different pricing policies. Look at server costs, per user costs and concurrent user costs. You may also have separate costs for additional modules such as Web content management; Business process management and collaboration modules.
You should be able to obtain fixed costs for the hardware and software as a result of the tendering process. The development or core service costs are more difficult to pin down. If you follow the implementation plan advocated in stage four of the toolkit then you should expect to obtain a fixed price to provide phases one to three (specification; model office and pilot/s. Once you move into phases four to six (roll out and corporate applications) it is less realistic to expect a fixed price as the amount of integration and business process management and change management services are very hard to define. What you should be looking for there are fixed daily rate costs for all staff levels and an indicative number of days to support the roll out based on a given set of assumptions. Support costs can be clearly defined and agreed at contract stage.
One set of additional service costs will cover the scanning and indexing of any legacy or backfile paper documents. Suppliers should be required to provide a framework of costs which can be used to agree the cost of any specific requirements that emerge during the project.
Training costs can be significant for a large number of users. Options here include paying the supplier to train the administrators, operators and a small number of users who are given the task of then training the other users. This approach is referred to as 'train the trainers'.
