A good contractor could have this solved in a week

[Mich the Tester]

A good contractor could have this solved in a week

An even better contractor will have it solved in a week then keep his gob shut about it and keep invoicing for a year.

[Pondlife]

An even better contractor will have it solved in a week then keep his gob shut about it and keep invoicing for a year.

Personally, I'd highlight that it would currently cost them £100 * 1.2M to retrieve the data themselves. Offer to do it for all for £1Billion and let them claim the praise for saving £20M


THEN get Bob in.

[Sysman]

The database already exists; it is merely either an OCR job or a re-keying job. Either way it gets outsourced to Bobs, or possibly Chans.

I looked at a very similar problem in the 1990s and the microfiche quality wasn't really good enough for OCR. Back then the best option was sending it to Malaysia or the Philippines for re-keying.