Changes to your application — discovered thru actual production use — is commonplace. New functions are needed, refinements to existing capabilities are identified, business needs change, and opportunities arise to further streamline your business process. In addition, bugs in the application do surface from time to time that were never exposed by PCA or our Client during the testing phase.

As a result, Clients frequently rely on PCA to solve problems or provide enhancements to an application that is in production mode — changes that are unforeseeable, and usually require immediate attention. It is far more cost-effective for PCA (and hence for our Clients) to dedicate the necessary level of engineering resources over a period of time vs. dealing with individual application maintenance and support issues as they arise. The effort required for PCA to evaluate, cost, code, test, manage, deploy and verify individual items as they arise requires unnecessary project management and administrative overhead — costs that can be avoided by a well-managed maintenance and support program.

PCA annual maintenance and support fees can range from 15% to 25% of the total Project fee, and are paid monthly over a one year period. Factors that impact the maintenance and support fee include: the volume and complexity of changes and refinements that we expect, your available resources and expertise (ability to support yourself), and level of PCA services (response times, 24/7 coverage, etc.).

Once your Project is complete, we will have a pretty good understanding of your support needs, and we will work with you to determine an appropriate monthly maintenance and support fee. PCA provides support tools and a process that we use to capture and track Client support requests and status, and track associated engineering efforts, so we can always reconcile actual vs. plan usage. PCA will send you an Annual Maintenance and Support Agreement following completion of your Project.