member blog article by Draycir, the authors of Spindle document management solutions.
Many businesses aspire to running a paper-free office, where desks are clutter-free, filing cabinets are obsolete and you never have to worry about losing an important document. Switching from paper to electronic processes can bring numerous benefits to a company, helping it to become more efficient, improve customer service and make significant cost savings.
The costs of handling documents quickly adds up when you consider the time spent by staff opening post, processing information and filing it away for future reference. Then if you need to find it again, you’ll find yourself rummaging through numerous filing cabinets and in-trays searching for the document in question. A conservative estimate, based on the research by PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Gartner, shows that a company with 5 staff, each handling 10 documents per day will face costs of around £31,500 per year.
This doesn’t take into account that companies like BAE estimate that 60% of their staff duplicate document handling processes. Nor does it gauge the effect on customer service, or the legal ramifications of, misfiled, lost or incomplete documentation. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimate that 7.5% of documents are lost and 3% are misfiled. Gartner conclude that the average document is copied, physically or electronically, between 9 and 11 times.
By using an efficient electronic document management system, savings can be made on filing and storage costs, allow more flexible indexing and retrieval, eliminate the risk of lost files as well as providing a disaster recovery system, improving security, controlling document distribution and help to improve regulatory compliance.
