Back in March I posted a short note about the white paper I’d written comparing the true long term costs of using the “free” DITA Open Tool Kit to publish your DITA content, against using a productized commercial solution, like ePublisher.

As a follow up to that paper I sat down and created a ROI (return on investment) tool that would allow someone to take the concepts I’d outlined in the white paper and apply some actual numbers to it. Of course the numbers I used were estimates derived from a combination of research and educated guesses based on my industry experience.

A few days ago one of our customers took the spreadsheet I’d developed and instead of using my estimated figures plugged his own actual figures in to it.

The results were staggering.

In summary for his twenty five writer technical publications shop

The actual cost to his organization (when you factored in purchase prices, training costs and time spent) in implementing and rolling out a DITA publishing solution using either the DITA-OTK or ePublisher were almost equal. In fact the actual difference was that ePublisher was 0.1 % more expensive.

Our contention has always been that the real savings in using ePublisher over the DITA-OTK is the long term costs of implementing changes and rolling those changes out. This customers figures did more than just confirm that – they gave results that we hadn’t even dreamed of.

For this particular customer, he calculated that every time they made a change to a publication design, or template, and rolled it out to all twenty-five writers it would cost them just over $3,000.

Making the same change and rolling it out using ePublisher – the cost would be under $30 !

A 100 fold reduction in cost for each change.

It doesn’t matter how much we as a company, or a marketing team, say that buying and implementing ePublisher is a more cost effective enterprise publishing solution than using the “free” DITA OTK, it only really has meaning when a customer proves it – and this customer has more than proved it.