BISBEE — The Cochise County government has been experiencing computer problems on a large scale, and the Board of Supervisors is now looking to begin upgrades to resolve those issues.

A computer crash in county payroll a few months back caused overtime for staff as they hand-wrote more than 1,000 checks for employees.

Last week, the county also lost e-mail capability and data as Microsoft Outlook crashed. Several county departments are working from programs that will soon no longer be supported or experience serious hiccups that create time delays and loss of data.

Staff in various departments has been requesting new software that is up-to-date and allows integration of information from other departments. A committee was formed to determine what would be a good fit for the county. Committee members talked with other counties to find out what they were using as well as contacted other companies that provide such programs.

During a work session on Tuesday afternoon, County Administrator Mike Ortega presented the Board of Supervisors with the committee’s findings.

“We knew we were going to have to address this at some point,” Ortega said. “Because of age, we are seeing more problems and that makes me nervous. It makes it more important to resolve this.”

Officials said some of the programs were far too expensive — more than $1 million — for the county to afford and had to be eliminated from consideration.

Ortega told the supervisors that the program that was the best fit for the county was a New World Systems program called dotNET and carries a price tag of $807,000. Money was budgeted for system upgrades last summer, so the money is there to pay for it. New World already provides programs for the county and offered a discount of $172,000 if the program was purchased.

New World’s dotNET includes various modules for use by different departments, yet allows the data to be shared. It will require special servers to run the programs at a cost of $80,000.

Four department modules which include financial, human resources/payroll, community development/planning and zoning and code enforcement are the ones slated for  upgrade.

The Blackbear program used by the Planning Department is unstable and will soon become obsolete, said Planning Director Susan Buchan. She said the software crashes on a monthly basis.

Prices for the modules range from $46,000 for code enforcement to $195,000 for payroll. The total cost for all the software is $368,900.

Implementation costs, which include training and transitioning, comes to $358,000. Those costs can be spread over a period of two years as each program is phased in, Ortega said.

The matter will come to the board as an agenda item at next Tuesday’s meeting, the board’s final meeting of the year.

• New World Systems: http://www.newworldsystems.com/