Digital document management and the real cost of paper

The average American worker uses nearly 10,000 sheets or roughly two boxes of paper a year depending on the Alliance for Resource Conservation In Washington DC, this number does not include any paper used for magazines, newspapers, and personal use. While according to International digital publications we use more than 786 million trees just to keep the world on paper for a year. Over the years, studies have shown that paper consumption continues to grow. ForestEthics.com indicates that consumption has increased by 20% year over year.

Many companies don’t even include paper as a line item in their annual budgets; This may be a mistake, as these same companies do not recognize the true cost of paper. When evaluating the true cost, we must also consider the costs of storage, lost documents, waste, and labor. Let’s take a look at these pieces of the puzzle some more, storage, for example; in an average office with 50 people on site and an average document flow, approximately 200 filing cabinets, occupying an additional 2400 sq. ft. office space (based on 12 sq. ft. each) to hold what’s in flow today and more $ 40,000 in additional costs for the cabinets. Those same documents could fit on a single server and significantly reduce cost. In fact, they could reduce your physical footprint along with costs. With premium real estate costing more than $ 2.00 square feet, even in these tough times, the monthly savings would be $ 4,800 a month or nearly $ 58,000 a year. For many small and medium-sized businesses, this could be the cost of an additional employee, which could mean a reduction or no reduction in their workforce.

Next, we must analyze the cost in the workforce. We will use the same office in this example. These same 50 people spend approximately 1.5 hours a day generating, filing and accessing paper, this includes having to recreate documents that are also lost. These employees earn an average of $ 30 per hour, and some executives earn significantly more. They spend a combined 75 hours a day playing paper. This is costing the company $ 2,250 per day, $ 49,500 at the low end per month, or nearly $ 600,000 in salary per year to play paper. Beyond the cost of labor and storage, the cost per impression (CPP) must also be looked at. Average CPP is $ 0.015 and includes toner, paper, and minimal maintenance. This does not include the cost of the printer or major repairs like battery kits, etc. Using the average of 10,000 sheets per office worker, this office generates 42,000 documents per month or just over half a million sheets per year. At $ 0.015 CPP, they are spending $ 630.00 a month or $ 7500 a year.

If we could cut each of these costs just in half, this company would be saving $ 332,750 a year in real estate, salary, and CPP or $ 27,729.16 a month. With the introduction of digital document management in their environment, this company would start to see immediate ROI and could reduce costs and increase productivity.

Additional investigations of PricewaterhouseCoopers, shows time spent on paper in today’s typical organization:

o 90% of all pages handled each day in the average office are simply shuffled.

o The average document is copied 19 times.

o 7.5 percent of all documents are lost, 3 percent of the rest are filed incorrectly.

o Professionals spend 5 to 15 percent of their time reading information and up to 50 percent of their time searching for it.

o There are more than 4 trillion paper documents in the US alone, increasing at a rate of 22 percent annually.

Considering these numbers with the others mentioned above, it is vitally important that companies begin to consider the cost of paper in their organizations and what they can do to reduce it, not only to align their budgets but also to help our situation as well. .

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