Taking Aim At Paper Costs

People often ask me isn’t document imaging really expensive compared to using paper. Good question!

If you knew what your paper systems are costing you, you would probably set your sights on this new target …

   

… saving money by using paper-less technology.

  Here are what experts are saying about how costly paper is to your organization:

	Professionals spend 50 percent of their time searching for information, and take 18 minutes to locate each document on average. -Gartner Research
	Companies typically misfile up to 20 percent of their records – thus losing them forever. -ARMA International
	$14,000 worth of productivity is lost per worker per year due to their inability to find the data they require to do their job. -IDC Canada
	A study conducted by The Delphi Group in 1999 found that 90% of typical office tasks still revolve around the gathering and distribution of paper documents. While 15% of all papers are lost, 30% of our time is used trying to find these lost documents. Companies on average spend $25,000 to fill a typical four-drawer file cabinet, $2,000 to maintain it each year, and over its life-span, a single sheet of paper ends up costing an average of $30. -Delphi Group
	US companies spend approximately $20 on labor costs in order to file a document, $120 on the labor required to find a misfiled document and $220 to reproduce a lost document. -Coopers & Lybrand
	For companies that manage their own files, employees spend between 20-40% of their time searching for documents manually. -Coopers & Lybrand
	90% of documents that are consulted daily are handled without any appropriate management. -Coopers & Lybrand
	For lost documents, companies pay a cost of searching, 6 times the value of the original document. -Coopers & Lybrand
	Companies that need to redo documents pay 11 times more than the cost of the original document. -Coopers & Lybrand
	Out of all documents generated, up to 7% are lost. -Coopers & Lybrand
	Employees spend more than 50% of their time searching for information. -Coopers & Lybrand
	Paper files are doubling every 3.5 years. -Coopers & Lybrand
	The average document is copied 19 times. -Coopers & Lybrand
	Each day one billion photocopies are made -AIIM, Forrester, Star Securities, US Department of Labor

What’s the ROI on document imaging?

A recent Price Waterhouse study provides evidence that document imaging could have a very quick ROI for your organization.

They searched 10,000 documents looking for a specific topic, author, and date range. A manual search of the paper files performed by a staff of paralegals took 67 hours and found 15 documents. The same search performed using a document imaging system took 4.5 seconds and found 20 documents.

What is the cost if a law firm cannot find 5 critical documents?

Larry Phelps
Solbrekk, Minneapolis MN

Permit Works and Laserfiche Video Demo

City of Shoreview Video Demo of Laserfiche

7 Flawed Assumptions:

I found these statements on another blog ₁ that I thought were very enlightening and very relevant to the topic of my blog.

 

1.     “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” ~Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

2.     “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” ~Ken Olson, president and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

3.     “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. ~Western Union internal memo, 1876.

4.     “640K ought to be enough for anybody.” ~Bill Gates, 1981.

5.     “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” ~Michael Dell on Apple, 1997.

6.     “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” ~Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

7.       “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” ~Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

 

When you read these statements, you may wonder how these experts could make such foolish statement.  It is easy to criticize these people, but we too must be mindful of our assumptions.

 

People have said to me, “Document imaging technology is too expensive for a company like mine.”  Or “I don’t need something like Laserfiche; I can just store PDF’s in a folder or attach them to my business application.”  I believe these assumptions are also flawed.

 

We recently installed Laserfiche for a client that had a system as described above and found that they had 25,000 orphaned documents that were not linked to any record in their business application.  Each of these document represented contracts and important documents that were “lost” prior to installing Laserfiche.  Our client thought they made a wise business decision, it was cheap and easy to attach PDF’s to their business application, but they now realize that their assumption was flawed.

 

 

Source:  http://www.copyblogger.com

Are you improving? Document Imaging may be your answer!

I recently read an article about a Japanese management strategy called Kaizen.   It is continuous slow improvement.  It is often used in manufacturing as an efficiency and defect-proofing process.  But Kaizen also, emphasizes the well-being of the employee, working smarter, not harder and developing best practices.

In your organization are employees spending countless hours each month shuffling paperwork?  What do you think the outcome would be if they spend those hours discovering other areas in your organization that could be improve?
Many people attempt to make radical changes to their organizations often fail because their employees get overwhelmed and resist the changes.  But, when presented with simple steps that they can quickly see improvement, helps to convert your employees from “resisters” to “changers”.

I often tell my customers, the best path to success in business is “evolution not revolution”!
I encourage you to look at document imaging as step one in your continuous improvement process.   In the past 13 years we have installed Laserfiche in all types of organizations and have seen huge success in making them more efficient and effective.  It is fun to see how quickly even the ”resisters” are learning the system and finding new ways to use Laserfiche.

If you have any questions about document imaging or Laserfiche, feel free to contact me.

Hope you found this post helpful.

Larry Phelps, VP Sales Solbrekk

Minneapolis, MN

larry.phelps@solbrekk.com

Business Tip – Productivity Equals Profit

I am launching a contest shortly on another web site
so I thought I would put this up. It may give you a clue
about what the contest is going to be about.

Keep checking back to find out when I launch, you
won’t be sorry.

The secret to boosting your productivity sounds almost too
simple: start working from checklists. The best kinds are those
that you create yourself. By all means use someone else’s
checklist as an idea-starter – but remember that we all work in
different ways and we all learn at different rates.

You might find that you suddenly get stuck when using someone else’s
checklist, because they seem to have left out a vital step. It’s
more likely that as far as they’re concerned, they haven’t left
out anything – they probably automatically do whatever it is, so
it didn’t even occur to them to write anything down.

When you run any kind of business, you tend to repeat certain
tasks over and over. However, when these tasks are new to you,
they can take a long time.

You make mistakes.

You get stuck.

You spend hours working out how to do a relatively simple task.

Then, NEXT time you have to perform the same task, you get stuck
again. You can’t believe that you didn’t scribble down a few
instructions as you went! Now you have to search for the same
information AGAIN. Aaarrgghh!

Get organized now and you’ll never have to waste time
repeating a search for essential information again. Here’s how you do
it.

1. Create a new folder on your desktop. (Right-click on the
desktop and choose NEW then FOLDER.) Call it “HOW TO”.

2. Open Notepad (If you haven’t used it before, you’ll find it
here: START/ALL PROGRAMS/ACCESSORIES/NOTEPAD. To put it on the
desktop, RIGHT click “Notepad” and choose SEND TO/DESKTOP). In
future, make it a habit to open Notepad before you ANY new task,
ready to jot down notes.

3. Type the name of the task you’re about to start on. (For
example: UPLOADING WEB PAGES.) Save your document – using the
same name – to your new HOW TO folder.

4. Minimize Notepad. (Do this by clicking the ‘minus’ sign in the
top right hand corner of the window. The icon for Notepad will go
down to the task bar on the bottom of your computer screen.
Whenever you need to make another note, just click on this icon
and it will bring the document up on the screen again.)

5. Begin working on your task. At the completion of every
successful step, bring up Notepad from the task bar and type what
you did. Save your document every time you do this (just in case
your computer shuts down unexpectedly).

6. If you have to send off a query to a help desk, or put in a
support ticket, or stop to do some research, make a note that
this is what you did. Copy and paste the URL of any website you
go to for help. This could be invaluable to you later.

7. When you have successfully completed your task, go through
your step-by-step notes. Tidy them up, and if necessary clarify a
step here and there. Make sure that this is a reliable, useful
checklist that you can follow the next time you need to do the
same thing.

Follow the same process every time you perform a new task. As
time goes on, you will have an invaluable set of personalized
checklists that will help you run your Internet business
smoothly. You also have the basis of a useful ‘how to’ product or
e-book that will help others who are just starting out.

I am sure I’ve mentioned this. Did you know document imaging
will save you lots of time and money?

For more info contact me at; Larry.Phelps@solbrekk.com

Take care,
Larry

Document Imaging – Disaster

I have been involved in sales for a longtime.
I am not a salesman, I am very analytical
and technical, but I have learned a lot about sales.

One of the lessons that I’ve learned is the it is very hard
to sell prevention. What do I mean by that?

What I mean is most people don’t eat right until
after the doctor tells them they have diabetes and if they
don’t change their eating habits they are going to be getting
shots everyday.

Or people don’t back up their computer systems until they
have their first crash. That’s what I mean about not buying
prevention.

But, I am going to try to convince you to put prevention
into action after you read this article.

It’s an older article that is still fresh, the subject matter
maybe a little harsh for some, sorry.

Go to,
http://www.thestreet.com/funds/dailyinterview/10001046.html

You cna always email me at: larry.phelps@solbrekk.com

Now go clean out your file drawers,
Larry

Document Imaging – Testimonial

You may be wondering, does document imaging/management really save organizations anything?  Here is a quote from one of my customers:

 “Using Laserfiche Document Imaging software has allowed us to eliminate so many file cabinets we were able to create 8 new 8×10 office cubicles!

But, the real savings for us was the huge time savings that it has been for our staff.”

Dick Crumb
It Director
City of Shoreview

 If you would like to read the complete article, just go to: http://www.laserfiche.com/newsroom/gme/issue10.html

I hope you found this article helpful.

Larry Phelps

Business Money Saving Tip – What Does a Piece of Paper Cost?

Here are some facts about the paper in your office that
you may not have thought about.

Over its life-span, a single sheet of paper ends up costing an average of $30.
-Delphi Group

Every year 7.5 billion documents are created and 15 trillion copies are made.

E-mails will double to 60 billion a day in 2 years.

7% of documents are permanently lost.

The average document is copied 18 times.

90% of business information is still on paper.

Misfiled documents cost $120 each.

4-drawer file cabinets cost $25,000 to fill
and $2,000 per year to maintain. (Source: Coopers & Lybrand 2004)

$14,000 worth of productivity is lost per worker per year due to their inability to find the data they require to do their job.
-IDC Canada
 
Professionals spend 50 percent of their time searching for information, and take 18 minutes to locate each document on average.
-Gartner Research

US companies spend approximately $20 on labor costs in order to file a document, $120 on the labor required to find a misfiled document and $220 to reproduce a lost document.
-Coopers & Lybrand
 
Companies typically misfile up to 20 percent of their records – thus losing them forever.
-ARMA International
With that in mind, do you think you could save time and money
in your office with a document imaging system?

If you have any questions, just email me at  larry.phelps@solbrekk.com

Have a good day,
Larry

PS: Free Document Imaging and Management Guide go to:  www.larry-phelps.com