Can you afford the status quo?
Ever wonder how much it's costing your organization to keep on handling things the same old way? You know the old axiom, if it ain't broke, don't fix it?! Well, there is a high, sometimes-hidden cost to using paper to shuffle information back and forth inside your business and beyond, with your customers and partners. Any way you look at it, it takes a LOT of staff time to word-process and publish all the forms and documents used in the exchange industry today. As a matter of fact, according to estimates, many American businesses spend up to 15% of their gross revenues on internal publishing and paper-based workflows, whether they know it or not!
When you add up all the labor involved the typical word-processed memo takes about 40 minutes to produce and print and costs about $25 dollars per page. The average report takes 3 hours, $74 dollars per page. The average manual, $98 dollars a page! SimplicityPro™ is a better way to do business!
The high, hidden costs of using paper
There is an unrecognized cost to every organization to operate and maintain a paper-based system of creating, sending, receiving, and processing forms, reports, files, photographs, etc.
One industry that has analyzed this overhead cost extensively is the healthcare industry, particularly physicians' offices. We have all seen the racks of patient records located behind the receptionist's desk in a physician's office. These offices have a predictable number of charts pulled daily, determined by the number of patients seen, the number of billings, the number of laboratory reports filed and the number of outside inquires. Study after study reveals that in a highly organized patient record system, with a dedicated person pulling and filing patient records, it takes six minutes on average to pull and re-file a chart.
When we apply the same efficiencies to organizations outside the healthcare industry, we begin to realize the cost of maintaining a paper-based information workflow. It is common to find organizations that pull a file every time a check comes in, or an invoice is received and paid. Each time important paper documents are received from outside the company, or produced within the company, they're eventually filed. This occurs with student applications, accounting records, job files, personnel records, human resource records, and so on.
SimplicityPro™ is a better way to run your organization!
How much am I spending?
Here's a quick analysis that calculates SOME of the actual overhead costs associated with paper-based workflows:
Assume that your organization either receives or generates 100 important paper documents that are filed daily (consider the volume of documents moving throughout your company, not just in the central office). 100 x 6 minutes each to file = 600 minutes daily. Dividing that figure by 60 minutes per hour = 10 hours. Multiplying 10 hours by $15 per hour (including Social Security and benefits) = $150 per day. $150 x 260 days a year = $39,000 per year. Keep in mind that in this example, we used a figure of 100 important documents in a HIGHLY EFFICIENT organization; your actual costs may be much higher.
The above analysis ignores the fact that in paper-based workflows, information is often lost or contains errors (of omission and comission) that must be corrected. According to a study by Cooper and Lybrand, "7.5% of all documents get lost and 3% of the remainder are misfiled." This suggests that there's a problem with about one out of every ten documents (i.e., it contains errors, is sitting on someone's desk, is in transit from one place to another, etc.), dramatically increasing operating costs. In addition, paper-based workflows only allow documents to reside in one place at a time. To share information, office personnel generally make and distribute copies. According to Cooper and Lybrand, "The average document gets copied 19 times, and of course, many of these copies also get filed."
SimplicityPro™ will save you money!
