In today's connected world, we can track pretty much everything. Our smart watches and step trackers count our daily steps, sleeping habits and other health related items. The smart refrigerator has an actual camera inside so you can see if you need milk right on your smart phone. And the smart doorbell lets you see who is at the door while you're on vacation halfway across the world. With all of this tracking in our personal lives, how can we carry over this tracking to the workplace? More importantly, how can we improve the manner in which we track document workflows between individual workstations and across locations? Can we minimize the steps to managing essential documents, while maximizing department productivity? The efficiency with which we can create, capture and share files directly affects the business's bottom line.
When examining departmental workflows - whether it's accounting, human resources or some other group - a leading document imaging company recommends asking yourself these five questions:
- Do you have a document digitization strategy or plan?
- Can you easily track your documents?
- How quickly/efficiently can you access the documents you need?
- How much time do you spend recreating hard copy documents into electronic format?
- Does your organization want to improve security, while increasing employee productivity and your bottom line?
Businesses today are constantly looking for ways to simultaneously reduce costs, increase productivity and enhance security. Relating to document workflow, the always-present human error factor, along with a lack of a streamlined solution, is often the issue for sensitive customer information being exposed.
Manual, hard copy processing of paper can be incredibly costly and time consuming. Here are some statistics on the "costs" of paper for an average business that can be shocking:
- On average, the cost in labor to file one document is $20.
- Between 2% and 5% of an organization’s files are lost or misfiled on any given day.
- Companies on average spend $120 in labor to find one misfiled document.
- One out of every 20 documents is lost.
- Approximately 25 hours are spent recreating each lost document.
- Approximately 10-12% of documents are not found on the first attempt.
- 400 is the number of hours per year the average employee spends searching for documents.
- More than 70% of today’s businesses would fail within three weeks if they suffered a catastrophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or flood.
- It takes an average of 10 minutes per paper document to retrieve, copy and re-file.
- The average document is copied 19 times.
- The average worker makes 61 trips to the fax machine, copier and printer.
- 60% of employee time is spent working with documents.
- 90% of a business’s information is in documents.
- Each four-drawer file cabinet holds an average of 10-12,000 documents, takes up 9 square feet of floor space and cost $1,500 per year.
– Sources: Gartner Group, AIIM, US Dept of Labor, Imaging Magazine, Coopers & Lybrand
Document workflow and management solutions help companies share information efficiently and with the confidence of enhanced security and quicker access. The ability to securely capture, process and route paper and electronic documents into your workflow processes benefits your company, as well as your customer. Imagine being the customer who is put on hold for 15 minutes while the service representative rifles through three drawers of paper to find your record! Not pleasant for the customer or the employee.
The bottom line is that keeping track of how your business exchanges documents and information addresses three business drivers that all owners want to improve: reducing costs, increasing productivity and enhancing security. Document workflows and management could be the ideal solution for you.
Contact Fraser today to learn how document workflows and management can improve your business and bottom line.