The fact is that businesses are drowning in a sea of paper. Studies have demonstrated that 90% of corporate information resides in paper documents, and workers waste approximately 20% to 40% of their time searching for documents manually. Lost or misplaced paper files are a common problem with potentially disastrous results. The following statistics on document management are alarming:
"70% of today's businesses would fail within three weeks if they suffered a catastrophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or flood." -Coopers & Lybrand
"Professionals spend 50 percent of their time searching for information, and take 18 minutes to locate each document on average." -Gartner Research
"Companies typically misfile up to 20 percent of their records - thus losing them forever." -ARMA International
"$14,000 worth of productivity is lost per worker per year due to their inability to find the data they require to do their job." -IDC Canada
"A study conducted by The Delphi Group in 1999 found that 90% of typical office tasks still revolve around the gathering and distribution of paper documents. While 15% of all papers are lost, 30% of our time is used trying to find these lost documents. Companies on average spend $25,000 to fill a typical four-drawer file cabinet, $2,000 to maintain it each year, and over its life-span, a single sheet of paper ends up costing an average of $30." -Delphi Group
"Market analysts report that paper use continues to boom by an incredible 6 to 7 percent annually." -Aber, Robyn, "Pining for a Paperless Office?”
"Overall 61% of Facilities Managers believe they are still too reliant on paper-based systems." -Capita Contact and Document Services
"Statistics show that 90% of the world's information today is still on paper." -Hemphill, Barbara, "The Fundamentals of Information Management"
"Each day one billion photocopies are made” -AIIM, Forrester, Star Securities, US Department of Labor
“US companies spend approximately $20 on labor costs in order to file a document, $120 on the labor required to find a misfiled document and $220 to reproduce a lost document.” -Coopers & Lybrand
“For companies that manage their own files, employees spend between 20-40% of their time searching for documents manually.” -Coopers & Lybrand
“90% of documents that are consulted daily are handled without any appropriate management.” -Coopers & Lybrand
“For lost documents, companies pay a cost of searching, 6 times the value of the original document.” -Coopers & Lybrand
- 90% of corporate memory exists on paper
- Of pages that get handled in the office, 90% are merely shuffled
- The average document gets copied 19 times
- Companies spend $20 in labor to file a document. $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document
- 7.5% of all documents get lost, 3% of the remainder get misfiled
- Professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information but 50% looking for it
- There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the US alone, growing at a rate of 22% per year
- Out of all documents generated, up to 7% are lost
- Employees spend more than 50% of their time searching for information
- Paper files are doubling every 3.5 years
- Companies that need to redo documents pay 11 times more than the cost of the original document
Source: Coopers & Lybrand
