Document Management: 27 Essential Facts to Know

Document management can be a great solution for organizations looking to ease the physical burden of a paper-ridden office. Solutions come in all flavors too; from a basic vanilla archival and retrieval system, to a full-blown, salted caramel coconut mocha chocolate chip enterprise content management system (ECM)! 

Toppings aside, what can also vary is the price tag — an expense that can be hard to stomach for an intangible object (at least you get to eat the ice cream sundae when you load up on the toppings.)

If you’re considering document management, but still aren’t convinced, I’ve pulled together some facts to help reveal what the average SMB could expect to gain from the investment.

Employee Productivity

• 80% of the papers we file, we never refer to again. (Small Business Administration)
• Most documents are copied an average of 19 times.
• Workers spend about $120 worth of professional time a day searching for misfiled documents. ($120x260 working days in 2017 – that’s $31,200 in salary spent looking for documents each year)
• 92% of workers collaborate over documents using email
• It takes a person an average of 18 minutes to find a document
• The average American worker with a shared central printer spends three extra minutes waiting for documents to print. For an SMB with 250 employees, that’s 3,250 hours (or 406 eight-hour days) wasted annually. (Xerox)
• Employees email two or more documents a day to an average of five people for review, which creates 10 new documents per day that are often stored in multiple locations.
• Middle managers say they miss important information almost every day because it exists within the company but they cannot find it. (Accenture)

The Dollars Add Up

• Each day workers make an average of 1 billion copies. (Forrester)
• The average office worker uses a whopping 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year.
• EDI Group, Ltd. estimates a $1-5 savings per document after implementation.
• An IDC study has shown a five-year return on investment (ROI) of 404% for Document Management implementations. Half of the organizations in their study had a payback as early as six months.
• Companies can take advantage of early payment discounts with faster processing of documents.
• Electronic billing and payment options for your customers might mean faster turnaround for your invoices.
• Electronic signature can save up to $20 per document.
• 45% of pages printed end up in the trash by the end of the day. 
• A full four-drawer file cabinet holds 18,000 pages. (NAPO)
• It costs about $25,000 to fill a four drawer filing cabinet and over $2,100 per year to maintain it. (Gartner Group, Coopers & Lybrand, Ernst & Young)
• Less documents to store=less need for storage
• Going paperless means more than eliminating paper expenses but also the cost for service and supplies of the printers churning out the pages themselves.
• The typical executive wastes 150 hours a year (almost an entire month), searching for lost information. For someone earning $50,000 a year, this loss is equivalent to $3,842 annually.  Forbes ASAP

Soft costs

• Time spent mishandling paperwork detracts from a company’s ability to service customers, increase sales, and improve the bottom line. (Small Business Administration)
• Better customer service: No need to call a customer back after your search for a document, pull it up in seconds with just a few keystrokes.
• Document processes can be improved with an integrated system which allows your team to create, send, store, and manage all documents within the same platform.
• Faster approvals with e-signatures.
• 90% of corporate member exists on paper. (Coopers and Mybrand)
• Insurance: 70% of businesses would fail within three weeks following a catastrophic fire or flood.

Document management is more than just filing digital documents for quick retrieval (though that is critical!) — it’s about streamlining your daily processes, helping your employees working more efficiently and and effectively, and perhaps most important, securing mission-critical documents so that business can go on as usual no matter the threat.