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October 05, 2005

Document Management vs. Classic Paper Routing

Document management has several advantages over traditional paper routing. It allows for increased productivity, cutting costs, and gives an organization the ability to respond dynamically to external changes. It costs a typical company 10 - 20 times more in form usage than the cost of paper itself.

To give a more detailed account of the actual cost of paper processing, you need an understanding of how much time and money is spent in each process. During the labor process, which can account for such tasks as loading, bursting, copying, collating, folding, and accessing papers, it can take approximately 10 minutes for the average employee. At a labor cost of $15.00 per hour, then one can say it would cost an additional $2.50. That small amount can easily add up over time, even in one week. Waste and inventory are two other processes involved. Waste is produced in the loading and printing stages. In most cases, no less than 2 forms are wasted in every print run. Inventory is of course the storage of paper, which can take a considerable amount of time if the inventory is fairly large and complex.

Another notable advantage of document management over paper routing is retrieval of documents. This is by far one of the most significant differences. The time it takes to retrieve a document by hand can vary on the size of the inventory, but is ideally slower than finding it electronically. Since many documents are filed according to an index number, a simple search for a particular document can take nearly seconds. Let's say a purchasing department is looking for an invoice by a certain invoice number. A simple search by that number can retrieve the invoice very quickly. Doing this same process by hand could mean looking through several different categories before the invoice number would be accessible. Typical case would be by company, then contact or manager.

Clearly there are advantages using document management over paper routing. How are you currently using this system or think it might improve your processes if you were?

Posted by Kenny on October 5, 2005 09:34 AM

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