Transcripts of the Attorney General's Initiative on DNA Laboratory Backlogs (AGID-LAB) Working Group

Monday, October 21, 2002

COST SAVINGS

MS. HART: That was really terrific. I don't know if you could feel it from here, but the immense envy in the room and the frantic note taking while you were talking is a real sign of the interest that you've generated around the room here. We were passing notes back and forth here on this.

If you could, it would be very helpful - we are going to take a break, but if you wouldn't mind staying at the tables as we move into our automation IT discussion, we could ask some questions. One of the things just to start I have to take the director's prerogative and ask a question here, which is the burning one I have. I presume you know how much this cost you, but have you figured out what this saves you in money? In other words, how much of a labor savings are you realizing here and what would it cost you to generate the same amount of work if you had done it in the traditional way?

MR. VAN NIEKERK: Yes, ma'am. This system - I can tell you exactly how much it cost us to establish it to this point because we went out and tendered for this given the fact that we are a government organization, and the total value of all 18 tenders that form part of this one process amounted to 11.8 million South African rand. I don't have a calculator with me. I couldn't tell you how many dollars that would be, but it's roughly speaking the equivalent of I would say about $1 million. So this is about $1 million.

Given the fact that, for instance, the genetic analyzer - if you just take one instrument, the genetic analyzer cost us 1.6 million South African rand. That's a chunk already taken away from the 11.8. So we are very satisfied at this stage with what we got for the money that we paid.

How much is it going to save us? I'll tell you now we would not be able to afford to run this system to capacity given the fact that your PCR mixing and your consumable costs are so high. We basically worked out that the consumable costs per day could amount to something like 124,000 rand, again in our currency, between 124 and 250 thousand rand per day, which is about $24,000, if you will.

The saving, that is a question that I would not be able to answer you because I don't know what the cost per man-hour works out currently at the lab, but basically we're looking at - if I can answer your question like this: Just as far as DNA isolation is concerned, the saving there is half an hour human operator intervention versus 96 hours lab technician intervention in a manual system, so the ratio is 1 to 192 in man-hours. So that is basically the kind of savings we're looking at from a man-hour point of view.

Would you like to add to that?

MR. MORRIS: I think that the main issue is it's very difficult to compare given our costing of manpower, but the point that I tried to make earlier was our moving people out, which is really a committed cost that I've got in the people that are employed, moving them out of this physical operation into the evaluation and evidence giving side of the work. So I've already got this, if you will, sunk cost which has been moved out to something which is going to enable us to produce results on the results which are being obtained from that system. So in that sense we're going to have a financial saving.

In terms of if one looks at sort of a payback on what the investment is, if one takes how many samples we would be able to process in a year given that there are no public holidays, no weekends, no nothing like that, how long is it going to take me to do that same number of samples with a given work force that is available, and that would give me some kind of measure of the effectiveness of the system.

MS. HART: This was terrific. It was a wonderful presentation and well worth bringing you guys here for. We're scheduled for a break now. If somebody else has a burning question or we could reserve it for after the break. How about a break, and we'll come back in 15 minutes, back at 3:00.