That’s simple...you have too much paper. Glance around your office. What do you see?
Paper. And lots of it.
Piled on desks. Hanging out of cabinet drawers. Waiting to be read, copied, mailed or filed.
And you’re not alone. Did you know that, despite available technology, 90% of all corporate memory still resides on paper?
Document imaging is that available technology. And using it will take your office paperless, saving you thousands of dollars each year.
HIDDEN COSTS OF PAPER-BASED FILING
Maintaining a paper-based filing system is expensive. Coopers & Lybrand reports that records and information systems often make up 50% of your total cost of doing business. Here's a sample of what they found:
- Cost to file a paper document: $20
- Cost to find a misfiled document: $120
- Cost to reproduce a lost document: $220
- The average document gets copied no less than 19 times
- The typical file grows more than 20% each year
One out of every ten documents is a problem, whether it’s sitting on someone’s desk, misfiled, removed from the office or simply “hiding” in the file. Check out these statistics:
- 7.5% of all paper documents are lost, and 3% of the rest get misfiled.
- We waste 20% to 40% of our workday searching for documents.
- We spend 5 times longer searching for paper documents than we spend actually reading or working with them.
- Paper shuffling makes up 90% of the time we spend handling paper documents. That means we actually work with them only 10% of the time.
Paper-based filing systems have other inherent drawbacks, too:
- Only one person can view a document at a time
- Inaccessible file cabinets—their contents are not available to everyone in a company, to colleagues in other offices or to clients.
- File cabinets take up valuable space (roughly 22.5 cubic feet). And with files growing at least 20% each year, you often need to add even more file cabinets.
ABOUT DOCUMENT IMAGING
Document imaging is the process of scanning your paper documents to convert them into exact electronic replicas. The document imaging system indexes and stores these documents in an organized filing system right on your computer network or on the Internet.
INSTANT RETRIEVAL
Retrieve your documents simply and efficiently from any computer with network access.
Type a keyword into the search field and the document retrieval system searches the stored images for a match. When you’re done, just click “Close.” The system automatically refiles the documents.
Voilà, you’re done. And you never left your desk!
Quick. Easy. Paperless.
No more time-consuming, frustrating and often fruitless searches, trying to find the right paper document in your overstuffed file cabinets or in those threatening stacks on your over-piled desks.
And you know what else?
With a document imaging system, multiple users can access a single document at the same time. No more waiting—or spending time at the copier—because someone else is using the document you need.
Document imaging gives you instant access and your office, increased efficiency.
SAVE ON STORAGE SPACE
A single filing cabinet drawer holds 10,000 paper documents. When stored electronically, 10,000 documents take up only 500 megabytes of storage—less than one compact disc.
An entire four-drawer filing cabinet (40,000 pages) requires only 2 gigabytes of space.
A single DVD holds 4.7 GB, or the equivalent of two four-drawer filing cabinets, and a 100 GB hard disk drive can hold the equivalent of 50 four-drawer filing cabinets.
Can you picture your office without all those cabinets and storage boxes? Document imaging brings that image to life.
A SECURE ENVIRONMENT
Worried about security? Document imaging systems require users to log in with a password, giving you the flexibility you need to control system access. Authorized personnel can view the documents they need, when they need them.
DISASTER RECOVERY
Although most businesses routinely back-up their servers, 90% of their “memory” remains on paper. Should disaster strike, say a fire or a flood, no backup exists for those paper documents.
According to Gartner Research, two out of five enterprises that experience a disaster go out of business within five years.
Document imaging protects your business from becoming one of Gartner’s fatal statistics. With a document imaging system, you can easily make copies of your electronic documents to store off-site.
A FINAL QUESTION…
Today’s competitive business climate demands that you find ways to cut costs, increase productivity and provide for disaster-proof information recovery. A document imaging systems helps you achieve these goals.
And when you look at the cost and dangers inherent with traditional, paper-based filing systems, can you afford not to go paperless?
Call Empire Document Imaging today at 888.868.2268
for more information or to make an appointment with one of our document imaging specialists.
