Why imaging at all?

| Back

Why imaging at all?

()

Usually, I'm answering to such questions asking "how much time are you(r workers) spending every day, searching for documents?"

Or (if I'm on a customer location): "Would you please find (for instance) our invoice/proposal/whatever from six months ago?"

Sometimes, they are willing to "play" such game... and manager makes a phone-call to his/her secretary, asking for a particular document... then, we are starting to count... minutes... coming up to 15, 20 or even a half of hour...

Then, I'm saying "you are having 100 employees... multiply that minutes with working days... = lots of money... if every employee is seeking for only one document every day."
In other words: 100 employees * 20 minutes a day * 250 working days = 8333 hours * $10 per hour = $83,000.

Some official numbers taken from Lee Mantelman: Imaging Guide¹ are actually even more "dramatic"... Delphi Group, for instance, found out that we are spending up to 30% of our time (more than 2 hours/day) with "paper handling"... so, I think that there is plenty of room for investments into imaging based on a simple math:
2 hours day * 100 employees * 250 working days * $10 per hour = $500,000.

Delphi:

90% of all documents handled each day are merely shuffled
Gathering and transfering paper documents consumes 90% of typical office tasks
Workgroups lose 15% of all documents they handle
They spend 30% of their time trying to find them

AIIM:

Companies spend 5% of their total filing costs on equipment, 20% on space and 70% on salaries
Typical four-drawer file cabinet holds 15,000-20,000 pages, costs $25,000 to fill and $2,000 a year to maintain

Coopers & Lybrand:

Companies make 19 copies of each document
7.5% of all documents get lost completely
Companies spend $20 on labor to file a document, $120 on labor to search for misfiled documents and $250 on labor to recreate a lost document

BIS: 90% of corporate "memory" resides on paper

Nolan Norton Institute - In an imaging environment (as compared to paper or micrographics:

Productivity per employee jumps 25-50%
Transaction times drops 75% or more
Cost savings for reductions in storage space requirement range from 50-80%

Ernst & Young - Electronic document management can:

Double or triple your processing capability
Cut staff time up to 50%
Reduce document storage space by as much as 60-80%

¹Lee Mantelman: Imaging Guide, Flatiron Publishing, NY, ISBN 0-9366648-67-8d

| Back