Cost Benefit Analysis of Document Management and Scanning

Did you know most companies are already spending 7-10% of their overall expenditures on manual document management processes? A business reinvestment strategy involving the conversion of paper documents to a digitized electronic document management program, through ECM Advisors can significantly help reduce the costs of managing, revising, and distributing your information.

Document Management Overview

• 92% of information is in manila folders

• 80% of technical information is on paper or microfilm

• Document management is now the largest cost in organizations

The Staggering Costs of Paper Documents

• 4 trillion documents are stored in U.S. files

• Paper files are doubling every 3.5 years

• The average document is copied 19 times

• Each day, nearly one billion photocopies are made

• The average worker has a 34-hour paper backlog

• Half of a worker's time is spent handling paper or data entry

• 50% of all projects are behind schedule

Additional Document Management Costs

• Filing a document costs 25-30 cents per sheet

• 3-5% of an organization's documents are lost or misfiled

• Cost to recreate a misfiled document is $120 - $250

• 7.4% of an executive's time is spent looking for lost or misfiled documents

• Counting lost and misfiled documents the average costs rise to $20.00 per document

 Sources: Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), Forrester, Star Securities and Computer World

 

The Cost Savings of Switching to Electronic Records Management

 

ECM Advisors conducts needs assessment survey for each customer, to uncover the current document management costs related to that specific organization. Once these costs are identified, our records management professionals can outline the immediate savings that will result from converting to an electronic records format.

 

Here's an example of the kinds of savings companies can realized immediately. If your organization averages 15 retrievals a day for paper files from your file room. Assuming an average employee is paid $15 an hour, including benefits, and it takes seven minutes to find, retrieve, and return each file, you are paying that employee $7,088 in filing costs each year. An electronic document system that allows you to retrieve your documents instantly from your desktop would reduce or erase this expense. The savings are even greater if your files take longer than seven minutes to find.

 

An electronic document management system also eliminates the cost of lost documents, or the time it takes to recreate a document that has been misfiled or destroyed. The average estimated cost for each recreated document is $250.

 

Another significant cost savings comes from the conversion of office space used to house records into a more productive work area. With real estate costs running between $20 and $35 per square foot, immediate savings can be realized by cancelling these unnecessary expenses. Additional savings can be found by eliminating the ongoing expense of files stored in a warehouse or off-site storage facility.