State the Case - Industry Facts

The facts are staggering. Paper consumption is at an all time high, companies are relying more and more on information and improved records management can provide real cost-saving benefits.

THE AVERAGE COST TO RE-CREATE A LOST OR MISFILED RECORD IS $100.00 - $150.00.

• Misfiles cost much more than you think! Valuable personnel time is wasted searching for misfiles and costly management time is wasted when actions or decisions must wait until misplaced information is found, making mis-file searches a very expensive problem.
• Some mis-file losses are immeasurable. Patient or customer goodwill and recreating lost files can cost an organization far more than $100 per misfile.
• 1% to 5% of all records are misfiled. Research shows that up to 5% of all information is missing when needed because it has been mis-filed.
• Misfiles can cost an average organization $192,000 (or more) a year. An organization with 64,000 files and a conservative misfile rate of 3% typically has about 1,920 records that are misfiled each year. At an average of $100 each, misfiles cost this company $192,000.00 annually.

RECORDS AND INFORMATION COSTS As much as 82 percent of records management costs can be directly correlated to labor. In fact, the cost to retrieve a misfiled document is 10 times the cost to retrieve an accurately filed one. (See Fig. A-1.) COLOR CODING REDUCES COSTS

Color coding assists in the retrieval and re-filing of file folders. In most environments, it can save 40% - 60% time over a similar folder without color coding. It does this by narrowing the field of search, because you can quickly locate the group or area of similar files.

ORGANIZATION OF DOCUMENTS WITHIN FOLDERS SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCES COSTS

Over 90% of the cost of a filing system is said to be the labor to find, use and file documents or materials that are within the folder.

TERMINAL DIGIT FILING CAN SAVE AN ORGANIZATION $ 80,000.00 (AND MORE) PER YEAR. FOR EXAMPLE:

• Two staff members start at 6:00a.m. and work for a total of 16 hours pulling files.
• One staff member starts at 7:00a.m. and works for a total of 8 hours pulling files.
• Two staff members start at 8:00a.m. and work for a total of 16 hours pulling files.
• This is a total of 40 hours per day pulling some kind of files and 10,000 hours per year (250 days/year). At an average wage per hour of $ 20.00, pulling charts cost this organization $ 200,000 annually. Terminal Digit filing can cut the 10,000 hours to pull charts to 6,000 hours per year (40%). Terminal Digit filing will cost that same organization only $ 120,000 annually, which is a cost savings of $ 80,000 per year

IF A MISFILE OCCURS WITHIN A TERMINAL DIGIT SYSTEM, DUE TO THE COLOR CODING, THE MISFILE IS ISOLATED TO 1% OR 1/10 OF 1% OF THE TOTAL SYSTEM.

BACK SHIFTING CAN COST AN ORGANIZATION $ 1,600.00 (AND MORE) PER YEAR.

An organization that does two back shifts per year utilizing two people for two, eight-hour days, spends 64 hours per year back shifting. At an average wage per hour of $ 20.00, back shifts cost this organization $ 1,600 annually.

PAPER VS. DIGITAL COST COMPARISON

1 CD = about 400,000 sheets of paper

1 CD = 120 cartons of paper

1 CD = $2 (or less)

Equivalent paper = $2,400

MISCELLANEOUS FACTS ABOUT IMAGING AND PAPER CONSUMPTION, ETC.

The average document gets copied 19 times.

7.5% of all documents get lost, 3% of the remainder get misfiled.

Professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% looking for it.

There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone - growing at a rate of 22% per year.

90% of corporate memory exists on paper.

Of all the documents that get handled each day in the average office, 90% are merely shuffled.

Source: Coopers & Lybrand