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Current Filter: Document>>>>>Opinion> No time to relax Editorial Type: Date: 05-2015 Views: 3059 Key Topics: Document Strategy Accounts Payable Analysis Capture Key Companies: EASY Software Key Products: Key Industries: Health | |||
| Document management is still not on everyone's 'Must-Have' list, argues Howard Frear, Director of Sales and Marketing, EASY Software UK. Speedy access to critical information separates the winners from the losers in today's information economy. And just as everyone organises their documents in some way or another - even if it's a 'home made' naming convention of always including the client name or a key word - then, everyone who is not using document management software spends far too much time looking for "lost" documents or trying to work out which is the most recent version. We all know this of course and would like to think that, in the second decade of the twenty first century, DM has finally gained full acceptance in the business world; but the truth is that some businesses still remain stubbornly unconvinced despite the facts and figures that support the business case.
WHY WOULDN'T YOU? Another statistic has it that the average office worker in the UK uses 15,000 sheets of paper every year with a cost implication of approximately £170 per person. At roughly 10 million UK office workers, that amounts to nearly £2 billion pounds being spent on possibly unnecessary paper. A 2012 IDC report ('The High Cost of Not Finding Information') found that information workers spent up to 20% of their time filing and searching through paper documents. On top of that, they wasted over 10 hours a week searching for, but not finding, documents, recreating lost documents and other time-consuming tasks. IDC has gone so far as to cost out three scenarios - Time Wasted Search, Cost of Reworking Information and Opportunity Costs To the Enterprise - that can help companies estimate the cost of not finding information and the productivity gains that can be achieved when they do. Using these three scenarios, IDC estimated that an enterprise employing 1,000 knowledge workers wastes at least $2.5 to $3.5 million per year searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, or recreating information that can't be found. The opportunity cost to the enterprise is even greater, with potential additional revenue exceeding $15 million annually. Plans, ideas, and thought processes have to be reinvented and recreated because an original document cannot be located and retrieved or - as sometimes happens when people retire or move on - other people are unaware of its existence. These figures, and many more like them, can all be attributed to the problems inherent in hardcopy document management - problems that have been known about for a long time. This is something that should concern everyone in business, as despite all the cheerful headlines about a recovering UK economy, most businesses are still not increasing their spending - which means that money spent carelessly like this if there really is no need is not really on. (Recent analyses of the EuroZone suggest it's still languishing in the doldrums, so this is doubly true for the UK's biggest trading zone - the EU.)
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