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Cornerstone Communications |
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Document Control & Your Business |
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Isn't Time You Control Your Documents?
Documents control the way Corporate America communicates. Documents are central to all business functions: Engineering, Purchasing, Order Entry, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and Human Resources. Documents influence the way people think and turn information into action. Purchase orders become raw material shipments, bills of lading cause product shipments, and we hope that invoices turn into cash receipts. Business would not function with out the involvement of business documents. How we manage documents should be a major concern, as seen by the following facts:
- Since 1984 printed documents in American businesses have increased 500%
- Document Processing Technology
- The average white-collar employee generates 12,000 documents per year
- UC Berkeley
- In 2003, American Business generated over 4.8 trillion corporate documents
- Data Warehousing Institute
- 90% of corporate information is stored in printed documents
- Imaging World
As critical as documents are to the flow of business, they have a very negative affect on corporate margins. Recently, Gartner Inc. completed a comprehensive study on the cost of creating, distributing and storing of business documents. They found that the lifecycle of document expenses could impact an organization ’s bottom line by as much as 2%. Included in these expenses were the cost of paper and toner, design and use of preprinted forms, printer usage and maintenance, envelopes and mailing labels, facsimile wear and tear, facsimile phone charges and postage, copier usage and maintenance, filing cabinets and supplies, and associated labor. Conservatively, they found that the average lifecycle cost of a business documents is $4.37. This equates, for even the smallest business, to over $52,000 per year reflecting on the fact that the average white-collar employee generates 12,000 business documents per year.
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Enterprise Document Management Solutions
 Contact us today for more information on how we can help your business! |
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Business As Usual
These are starling figures considering the cost of business documents are growing at an annual rate of 22%. Corporate America has unfortunately classified this as “business as usual”. White-collar employees are printing documents on pre-printed forms. Those documents are stuffed into envelopes taking 3 to 5 days to reach their destination. Physical copies are manually filed in file cabinets. “Business as usual” is not a very efficient business.
This fact was driven home by Cap Ventures findings. They estimated that the lack of corporate document management costs America businesses up to 15% of their annual revenue. Why is no one doing anything about document management? The costs are invisible. No one has ownership of these day-to-day document activities and the costs associated with them. There is no line item on your P&L that says this is the cost of your documents. Costs are blended into a multitude of expense accounts such as: office expenses, postage expenses, rent or leases, supplies, printing expenses, depreciation, wages, employee health care, and bonuses. These expenses from Poor or No document Management are ubiquitous. Everyone has them, but only 1 out of 4 business has adopted a document management program.
Controlling Your Documents
Fleetwood Folding Trailers found themselves in a similar situation. Fleetwood Folding Trailers is the nation’s largest manufacturer of recreational vehicles. Their sales were flat and expenses were rising. They took a non-traditional look at the items putting pressure on their margins. They focused on the cost of their business documents.
An analysis found that they were spending roughly 14.2% of their annual sales managing (or not managing in this case) the lifecycle of their business documents. Once they had realized the negative pressure that poorly managed documents had on their business, they applied a document management program. This resulted in a 67% reduction of the costs associated with creating, distributing and storing business documents. Fleetwood achieved these dramatic results when they stopped looking at documents as “business as usual”.
Document control, or document management programs traditionally reduce document related expenses up to 96%. This would transform the annual cost per white-collar employee of $52,440 into a managed cost of $2,250.
Today companies are struggling to fight margin compression through traditional methods by:
- Struggling to increase sales
- Hoping to negotiate better purchasing prices from their vendors (who are in the same boat)
- Trying to do more with less
Controlling the costs associated with creating, distributing and storing business documents can positively affect bottom line profits up to 2%. Kevin Craine, author of “Designing a Document Strategy”, says is best, “The way we manage documents has a great deal to do with the way we manage business.”
Click here to learn how to assert effective document control by investigating our proven document management program.
Proven Document Management and Cost Reduction Strategies
Toll Free: (888) 427-5663 | Request Information | Site Advisor | Free Document & Content Management Webinars | |
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