The Cost of Documents

Okay, you just brought in a new client, great! It's smooth sailing from here. But stop for a moment and think, the proposal, the billing statements, the service records...those are all necessary and lord knows you need to keep records.
I have a question for you; have you ever thought of the cost of documents, and I just don't mean the cost to put the toner on the paper. Let's look at some statistics:

A recent study shows that it costs over $2,000 per year to maintain a single 5-drawer cabinet.
Source: Oregon State University

According to The Association of Information Professionals, a 4-drawer file cabinet:
Holds 15-20K pages
Costs $25,000 to fill
Costs $2,000 per year to maintain

The major costs in paper filing systems are:
15% is spent on equipment
10% is spent on space
75% is spent on salaries
Source: Price Waterhouse

Of all the document that are handled each day in the average office, 90% are merely shuffled. Currently, 90% of the corporate memory exist on paper.
There are over 4 trillion documents in the U.S. alone-growing at a rate of 22% a year
Source: Price Waterhouse

Professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information but up to 50% looking for it.
Source: Price Waterhouse

Corporate paper-based documents are growing at a rate of 200% a year
Source: Price Waterhouse

19 copies are made from each paper document
22% of all documents are lost
7.5% of paper documents are lost completely, 3% of the remainder get misfiled
$20.00 is spent on labor to file a document
$75.00 is spent on labor to process a document(The Gartner Group)
$120.00 is spent on labor searching for the misfiled paper documents.
$250.00 is spent on labor to search for lost files.
Quoted reference: Coopers & Lybrand

Document processing includes labor and materials for the printing, storing, filling out, receiving approval and putting the information into the business system.
A simple form, such as a vacation time request, costs a company over $150 per form to process
(Microsoft study)

The Gartner Group has found that for every dollar spent on producing forms, between $30 and $60 is spent processing those forms, and estimates that $360 billion is spent annually on processing data from forms.

With increasing regulatory controls, this process will only get worse in government, insurance and financial industries as increasing amounts of information must be extracted and processed from increasingly varied sources.
Source: Digital Publishing Solutions March/April 2001

It is predicted that the sheer amount of information requiring processing will grow at a rate of 200% a year
Source: The Yankee Group


Gartner has indicated that between 5%-15% of a companies total annual revenues are spent for the producing and managing of documents, but that those companies who have implemented a document management strategy can save up to 40% of those costs.

The questions is: do you have a document management strategy?