Project success
Which costs should you include in an EPM project?
Licence prices alone do not establish an EPM project budget. Compare implementation spending, resources and operating costs over several years.
By Antonio Daif· Published on 17 October 2026
Define a comparison scope
Choose a common horizon, for example three or five years, and state the assumptions: users, entities, processes covered, volumes and deployment pace.
Without this basis, two proposals may look similar while covering different needs.
Identify the main categories
| Category | Items to examine |
|---|---|
| Software | Subscriptions, user profiles, modules, environments and options |
| Scoping | Assessment, requirements, tendering and design |
| Implementation | Configuration, models, interfaces, reports and development |
| Data | Cleansing, mapping, historical migration and checks |
| Internal involvement | Finance, IT, business and administration time |
| Deployment | Acceptance testing, training, documentation and start-up support |
| Operations | Support, maintenance, operation and enhancements |
| Transition and exit | Tool coexistence, archiving, extraction and reversibility |
Not all these items produce an external invoice. They nevertheless represent effort to plan for.
Examine contractual assumptions
Ask what happens if contributor numbers increase, a new entity joins the scope or another module becomes necessary.
Also check renewal conditions, any minimum commitments and excluded services. These depend on each offering and must be confirmed in the contractual documents.
Allow for uncertainty
An initial budget includes areas that are less well understood: data quality, legacy interfaces, undocumented business rules or team availability.
Include a provision for identified risks. Update it as scoping reduces uncertainty.
Compare costs with benefits
Measure expected gains against the current situation: production time, number of corrections, availability of outputs and ability to update forecasts.
Time saved becomes a financial saving only if the organisation can actually reduce or avoid expenditure. It may also be redeployed to analysis and business support.
Reliability, traceability and service continuity can justify a decision without being fully converted into monetary values.
Want to compare proposals? Let’s build a view of costs and benefits on a common scope.
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