# Memorandum — KOMET operating costs (provisional figures)

**From:** Heike Brandt (Commercial Director)
**To:** Lenkungsausschuss, Projekt LEUCHTFEUER
**Date:** 10 June 2024
**Classification:** internal — provisional figures, final operations audit pending

At the kickoff I promised to put the cost of keeping KOMET alive in writing rather than leaving it
as meeting-room folklore. This memorandum does that. Please read the word *provisional* as often
as it appears: the internal operations audit that underpins the outage figures is still running,
and I would rather hand the committee an honest estimate now than a polished number next year.

## 1. Standing licence and support costs

The annual licence and support contracts for KOMET stand at EUR 310,000. I want to be precise
about what that money buys: it buys the contractual right to keep running what we already run. It
buys no development, no regulatory updates, no support engineer who picks up a phone. Since the
vendor's insolvency these contracts are serviced by a rights-holder that maintains nothing; the
fee is, commercially speaking, rent paid on our own dependency. Every year we stay on KOMET, this
line item recurs in full and purchases standstill.

## 2. Cost of unplanned standstill (provisional)

The running internal audit has produced a first estimate of what an hour of unplanned KOMET
downtime actually costs this company. Counting delayed shipments, contractual penalty clauses in
the affected customer accounts, and the overtime needed to work off the backlog, the provisional
figure is approximately **EUR 18,000 per hour of unplanned standstill**. I must stress the
character of this number: it is an order-of-magnitude estimate on a methodology the audit has not
yet finalised. Treat it as directionally correct and numerically provisional until the final audit
report replaces it. It should inform our sense of urgency; it should not yet appear in any
external document.

## 3. The structural cost nobody sees on an invoice

KOMET requires a fixed maintenance window every Sunday from 02:00 to 06:00, during which order
release pauses at all sites. That window predates most of the people who now work around it. It
costs us nothing on paper and four hours of the estate's most valuable weekend ramp-up time in
practice; the sites have simply learned to schedule around the system rather than the business.
A platform without that standing pause changes Sunday operations planning across the estate — a
benefit the licence-cost comparison alone never shows.

## 4. Five-year comparison

Setting the recurring KOMET costs against the QUAYSTONE licence and operating model over a
five-year horizon, the migration case is favourable in every scenario the controlling team has
modelled, including the pessimistic ones. The full TCO model with its scenario table is filed in
the project share under "Controlling / TCO 2024-05"; I will not reproduce a spreadsheet in prose.
The conclusion the committee needs is one sentence long: continuing to run KOMET is not the cheap
option, it is merely the familiar one.

## 5. What I am asking of the committee

Nothing today, except discipline in how these figures are used. The licence figure in section 1 is
final and contractual; quote it freely. The outage figure in section 2 is provisional; quote it
with its caveat or not at all. When the operations audit closes, I will replace this memorandum
with final numbers, and the provisional ones should then be retired from circulation rather than
living on in old slide decks — we have all seen what half-remembered numbers do to a business case
three budget rounds later.

Heike Brandt
Commercial Director, Blauwal Logistik GmbH
