For many organizations, document management is on a long-term wish list but hasn’t yet taken priority. Perhaps the cost of implementation is a hinderance, or maybe it’s the fear of bringing on new technology and struggling to get it adopted by the organization. The problem with stalling on document management is that the longer your organization waits to bring on a solution, the more it costs you.
Stalling your document management project has a host of hidden costs, including:
- Lost Productivity: A 2012 IDC study of IT professionals from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia and Japan found that information workers lose a significant amount of productivity to challenges working with documents. The survey revealed that the loss averaged about $19,732 per information worker annually, and a 21.3% loss in the organization’s total productivity. According to a report published by M-Files, professionals spend 50% of their time searching for information. All of this time spent chasing down information could certainly be better used on more productive activities, if only employees could be freed from the bonds of inefficient paper processes.
- Lost revenue: The average manually processed invoice costs a company $22.75. Automatically processing invoices drops that cost to $3.40 an invoice. Losing documents is also a major expense to consider. According to the M-Files report, an enterprise with 1,000 workers wastes between $2.5M and $3.5M annually searching for nonexistent information, failing to find information or recreating lost information. Executives also spend an average of six weeks per year searching for lost documents.
- Dissatisfied workers: A study published by Adobe discovered that 83% of office workers surveyed in the US, UK, Germany, France and Australia feel their success and productivity are slowed down by outdated document processes. Worse yet, 61% said they would switch jobs solely for the sake of dramatically less paperwork. Don’t lose valuable employees over paperwork.
- Limited accessibility: If staff can only access crucial information from the office, they face serious limitations in optimizing their time. With an increasingly mobile workforce—3.7 million employees work from home at least half the time—having remote access to information is essential to working efficiently. According to AIIM’s report “Capitalizing on Content,” organizations gain a 20-25% increase in efficiency by providing staff with remote access to information.
Don’t allow these costs to continue to pile up and wreak havoc on your company. Take the first step and contact the document management experts at PSIGEN to learn more about developing a more efficient document strategy.
