Lesson 10 / 25
Build and One-Off Costs
Everything before the first real invoice.
More than engineering
One-off costs include discovery and process design, engineering and integration with existing systems (often the largest item), building an evaluation set and testing, security, privacy and legal review, change management and training, and the pilot itself. Integration with legacy systems and data clean-up are frequently underestimated; add contingency proportional to uncertainty.
Build, run, oversee, maintain
API fees are a small part of the cost; people and upkeep usually dominate.
One-off cost lines
Typical categories for an automation project.
discovery & process design 8,000
build & integration (ERP, email) 30,000
evaluation set & testing 6,000
change management & training 5,000
security & legal review 4,000
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one-off total 53,000 (+ contingency for integration risk)Add contingency for integration
Legacy integrations rarely go as planned; 20 to 50% contingency on that line is common.
Quick check: Which one-off cost is often underestimated?
- Integration with existing systems and data clean-up
- Buying a laptop
- Writing the project name
- Printing slides
Answer
Integration with existing systems and data clean-up — Integration is usually the hard part.