Downsize Expensive Document Spending Instead of Downsizing Your Business
As businesses across America continue to become extinct due to the current economic climate, identifying areas to save money and become more efficient are top priority. When identifying areas to cut spending, more often than not, paper usage costs slip under the radar.
Document Management is defined as a method for managing the entire lifecycle of paper-based or electronic documents. Companies functioning with a paper-based filing system and paper-based processes, especially companies in the life science, legal, education, government, and financial industries, have become inundated with paper usage and cost. Managing this level of documentation and unwieldy, paper-based processes has eaten away the majority of worker productivity effectually having a negative impact on company spending and resources. Additional costs of paper usage include storage fees - both on and off site, furniture costs - filing systems, cabinets, shelves, etc., parcel cost and reproduction costs - a large percentage of corporate documents are lost or misfiled.
Just how much is document spending costing you? The following example is an estimate of how much paper is costing you: A clerical worker paid $14 an hour, costs 23ยข per minute. If the time to process a document is reduced by one minute per document, and a company handles 2,000 documents per day, one minute can save $460 per day or $115,460 per year.
Outlined below are the quantifiable cost benefits of a Document Management System:
- Document Maintenance / Safety - documents stored in a system are there permanently and can be easily searched and retrieved if misfiled or missing.
- Filing - process is automated, as opposed to minutes to hours spent manually filing. Time saved will increase productivity, essentially cutting cost.
- Document Retrieval - allows all company documents to be easily accessed via the web by any, qualified employee at any time. Document indexing capabilities allow instant, relevant search of every word on all archived documents for instant retrieval in mere seconds; as opposed to the countless minutes to hours spent searching for a hard copy in filing cabinets or even in storage.
- Accessibility - permissions can be set to allow anyone secure access to a document via the web. Also the document routing and approval processes can be automated and instantaneous.
- Collaboration - allows document access by multiple users simultaneously. Additionally annotation tracking and versioning capabilities allow complete management throughout the entire document life cycle.
- Security - multi-level, rights based security applicable to all accessible documents. Allows permissions to be set to limit users from performing specific tasks.
- Disaster Recovery Planning - systems can be backed up and copies stored off-site so in the event of a disaster, restoration can be completely achieved in a short timeframe.
Soft cost benefits include increased level of customer service - faster response time resulting from faster document retrieval rates, multi-user document access - including savings from alternatively having to make multiple copies of a document, reduced margin for error - including misfiling errors and replication costs, and increased productivity.
Document management solutions can be put into place with minor to no noticeable disruption of the business. When comparing the investment cost with the investment return and productivity increase it is logically justified. Increased efficiency and better customer service will provide more time for your company, time that can be better spent working ON the business and not just IN it.
