It's time to buckle down and start eliminating waste and reducing overhead in every company! Where is the first place a company can start to do both very quickly? For most of us, it is the amount of paper we are using filing, throwing away and archiving every day. Look around your desk right now; take a quick inventory of how many pieces of paper will move from your desktop to the trash can. And then do that exercise again for how many sheets will get filed and eventually archived.

One of my most favorite projects as a Network Engineer was for Coca-Cola back in the early 2000's and they had started asking us to tape all of our receipts on to paper so that they could be scanned in to a document conversion system that would archive the information. It was genius (and as you can tell new to me at the time). They no longer had to retain space to archive all of those receipts from thousands of employees, they would now be held in a computer and retrieved even easier. Imagine the time saved in the Accounting department.

Let's look at some numbers to see if converting documents to computer files save money. The world's leading information technology research and advisory company, The Gartner Group, say's it takes about 7 minutes to find and retrieve an archived piece of paper. How many times a day does a staff member have to visit the file room? I'm going to say 6 times, and then the last piece of the puzzle is cost per hour. An average cost per hour for administrative help, including benefits of the employee, is $16/hour. That is a yearly cost of over $2,700 per administrative person.

A document conversion system (like Image Silo, OnBase or PaperVision) allows you to eliminate the paper document completely, allowing the office staff to search and retrieve that same document instantly without ever leaving their desk. And even better, they can e-mail the document saving yet another piece of wasted paper. No more copying and faxing paper documents, and printing documents for the file.

Another, sometimes forgotten, overhead expense of archiving documents is the space required to store all that paper. Not to mention the risk of that paper ever catching on fire and being gone forever. That storage space has a real expense tied to it as well, to the tune of $12 - $30 per square foot. What else could your company do with that space? Or the money you are spending on that space?

What about lost documents? Every company has had to recreate a lost document that was accidentally thrown away, misfiled or maybe even shredded. By using a document management system your company can avoid all of these disasters. But what is the cost associated with lost documents? The average cost is $250 per document!

It looks like document conversion can save companies a lot of money and the planet even more trees. There is one more aspect to implementing a document conversion and management solution, employee morale. People want to be productive, and when employees are performing rudimentary tasks that feel like a waste of their time and intellect they are naturally less fulfilled in their job. Having a system in place that allows your employees to perform more efficiently will increase production by a number that is difficult to calculate … but it is real!