There is an unrecognized cost to every organization to operate and maintain a paper-based filing system
One industry that has analyzed this overhead cost extensively is the healthcare industry, particularly physicians' offices. We have all seen the racks of patient records located behind the receptionist's desk in a physician's office. These offices have a predictable number of chart pulls daily, determined by the number of patients seen, the number of billings, the number of laboratory reports filed and the number of outside inquires. Study after study reveals that in a highly organized patient record system, with a dedicated person pulling and filing patient records, it takes six minutes on average to pull and re-file a chart.

When we apply the same efficiencies to organizations outside the healthcare industry, we begin to realize the cost of maintaining a paper-based filing system. It is common to find organizations that pull a file every time a check comes in, or an invoice is received and paid. Every time important paper documents are received from outside the company, or produced within the company, they eventually are filed. This occurs with accounting records, job files, personnel records, human resource records and so on. There is often an ebb and flow of several office personnel trafficking through out a paper-based filing system to retrieve and return documents.

The following analysis calculates the actual overhead cost associated with a paper-based filing system
Assume that you either receive or generate 100 important paper documents that are filed daily. 100 x 6 minutes each to file = 600 minutes daily / 60 minutes per hour = 10 hours x $15 per hour (including S.S. and benefits) = $150 per day x 260 days a year = $39,000 per year. In this example, we used 100 important documents to be filed and retrieved in a highly efficient filing system. It is easy to estimate the maintenance cost of your paper filing system: estimate how many times your organization files or retrieves a document and then use the 6 minute per document pull analysis just described.

The problem of lost and missing documents
The above analysis ignores the fact that in a paper-based filing system, documents often cannot be found. According to a study by Cooper and Lybrand, "7.5% of all documents get lost and 3% of the remainder are misfiled." This suggests that one out of every ten documents is a problem (sitting on someone's desk, being removed form the office, etc.) and takes longer to retrieve. This dramatically increases the costs involved in paper filing systems.

In addition, paper-based filing systems allow paper documents to reside in only one place at a time. Therefore, office personnel generally make their own copies. According to Cooper and Lybrand, "The average document gets copied 19 times, and of course, many of these copies also get filed."

The problem of storing paper files
There is also a cost associated with storing documents both on and off-site. Our system allows you to store 21,000 documents on a $1.00 CD or 1,333,000 documents on a 40 GB external hard drive costing approximately $250. A simple comparison tells the story; compare the one time charge of $250 for storing these documents on an external hard drive to the annual cost of maintaining 148 file cabinet drawers.

A document imaging system provides your workforce with immediate access to information Finding and retrieving a document using a document imaging system is incomparably faster than the same process with a paper-based system. With our system, personnel can search for documents from their desktop PC by simply clicking on a "Search" icon. Within a split second of search execution, every document that contains the specified keywords will appear on the computer screen. To re-file the documents, simply click the "Close" button and the document is re-filed instantly. An imaging system quite simply eliminates the wasted man hours spent filing, searching, retrieving and re-filing paper documents. The amount of time saved is enormous and gives a business the option of either re-allocating an employee's time to more productive tasks, or reducing the size of its workforce.

In many organizations, several people need access to the same document. When a file is removed from the filing cabinet, work is interrupted for anyone else needing access to that file. The result is what the manufacturing industry would call "work stoppage," slowing production and increasing costs. It also elevates the frustration level among personnel.

This problem is eliminated with our document imaging system. Because multiple users can access electronic PDF documents at one time, information tends to flow more freely using our system. The benefit is straightforward: immediate access to documents results in higher office efficiency.

Likewise, office personnel can spend a significant amount of time returning telephone calls and playing phone tag when attending to the daily phone tasks that require information from a file. A document imaging system offers instant access to the file from any networked PC, allowing personnel to handle incoming calls immediately, thereby eliminating recalls and phone tag. This saves time, cuts costs, improves office efficiency, and increases customer satisfaction. The ability of a document imaging system to cut expenses and increase productivity is simply unparalleled by any other cost reduction strategy.

Electronic documents can be copied and stored off-site, protecting records in the event of a disaster
The moment a disaster strikes, whether a fire, flood, tornado or other dangerous event, is only the beginning of disruptions that can last weeks to years. Gartner Research recently released a chilling statistic: two out of five enterprises that experience a disaster go out of business within five years. A crisis is not the time for planning. The absence of adequate planning hampers recovery efforts, and can result in enterprises requiring significantly greater time to recover - if they are able to recover at all.

One of the inherent benefits of an electronic document is that a copy can easily be made and stored off-site. Although enterprises routinely back-up their servers, the problem that 90% of an organization's knowledge resides in paper remains. The advantage of a document imaging system is that it converts these paper documents into electronic documents capable of being copied and stored off-site.

The benefit of document imaging for disaster recovery was never more apparent than in the aftermath of Sept. 11th. Since then, companies recovering from the catastrophe have been trying to piece together the millions of documents contained in lost files. One company, Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, has since relocated to facilities in New York and Pennsylvania. According to Ann Mottola, Assistant Vice-President of Customer Service Technology, "Empire has a comprehensive digital imaging system that has grown over the years to encompass nearly all the insurance carrier's paperwork. When disaster struck, Empire's mirrored facilities in Harrisburg, PA, Middletown, NY and Yorktown Heights, NY were up and running within hours."

One would hope that a disaster never strikes their organization, but if it does, the return on investment of a document imaging system is not measured in dollars and cents. It is measured in peace of mind; knowing that your organization will not become one of the statistics mentioned by Gartner Research.