The Paperless Project lists some sobering statistics on their web site that bring attention to the incredible amount of paper office workers continue to use each year. Despite major advancements in digital imaging technology, and document management systems that can bring incredible value and improvements to every company and organization, we continue to push paper over electronic images.
Why?
I suspect one reason – that has been with us for years – is that sales people continue to try and sell you technology instead of showing you how to solve your business challenges by usingtechnology to achieve dramatic success in driving paper out of your business processes. It sounds simple, but if it was that easy – we would be making more progress in changing the addiction to creating and printing copies when we can truly run our businesses by moving images and information electronically through our organizations.
How dependent on paper are we? Well these statistics from The Paperless Project web site will give you something to ponder if you need some ammunition to get the attention of management to start getting serious about scanning your business documents, indexing them so multiple people can find them when searching on different taxonomies, manage them effectively, securely and confidentially in a trusted document management system and control who has access to them, what they can do with them, and have a complete audit trail of all document transactions.
Consider these facts:
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- The average office worker continues to use a staggering 10,000 sheets of paper every year, according to statistics from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
- The amount of paper recovered for recycling in 2010 averaged 334 pounds for each person living in the U.S.
- In the past twenty years, the combined usage of today’s top ten paper users has increased from 92 million tons to 208 million tons, which is a growth of 126% – showing that computers are not slowing down the amount of paper we use.
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We have document management solutions that can greatly reduce the amount of paper and document management systems that can help you manage your documents – so why does this problem still exist?
Consider these costs when running your business on paper and think about the paper-intensive applications you could automate; such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, human resources, manufacturing, mortgage loans, medical records, procurement, and government documents.
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- The average document is copied 9 to 11 times.
- Filing costs average $20 per document.
- When an employee walks out of a company, 70% of their knowledge walks out the door with them.
- 18 minutes is the average search time to find a document.
- Each misfiled document costs $125.
- Each lost document costs $350 to $700.
- Paper in the average business grows by 22% a year, meaning your paper will double in 3.3 years.
- At any given time, between 3 and 5 percent of an organization’s files are lost or misplaced.
- U.S. managers spend an average of four weeks a year searching for or waiting on misfiled, mislabeled, untracked or “lost” paper.
- Large organizations lose a document every 12 seconds.
- We are approaching 4 trillion documents being stored by businesses and government agencies.
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These statistics are staggering when you consider the benefits of scanning your business documents. Many of these high costs associated with running a business can be dramatically lowered or eliminated with an effective document management system designed to automate all the issues, remove paper from your business process, and generate a significant cost savings while increasing employee productivity and the level of service you will be able to provide to your customers.
If these statistics mirror the paperwork challenges at your company today, then talk to us tomorrow.