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First Some Typical Numbers and Costs
Consider the following typical costs in a manual (non-electronic) office environment:
There are 3,000 pages in a typical four-drawer filing cabinet.
Each filing cabinet occupies 9 square feet.
Filing cabinets cost about $150 each.
There is roughly $40 worth of file folders per cabinet.
A bookshelf costs around $100.
18 minutes is the average manual search time for a document.
$40 per hour is a professional rate and $7 to $11 for filing people
20% of all active documents are photocopied at $.05 per page.
6 minutes is the average time it takes to process a fax.
Benefits of Electronic Document Management
Benefits of an electronic document management system include:
Space Savings
The paper contents of an entire floor of paper document storage can be put into a space the size of a desk.
With a CD-ROM, you can put roughly 20,000 scanned document pages—or roughly 300,000 pages of ASCII text— on one drive.
You can execute a search in about three seconds, and display a page in ten seconds.
In another 30 seconds, you can print a copy.
A catalog listing the parts for every car model in the last 10 years would consume just seven CD-ROM disks—more than a million pages!
Search By Multiple Keys
Try using the following criteria to manually search for documents:
"Of all the automobile registrations we have, how many were issued between the 1st and 15th of
November last year for people named Jones?
With an electronic document management system, such a search would take about three seconds.
Price, Waterhouse did a study to test the feasibility of an electronic document management system. They looked manually for 20 documents, selected randomly from a sample of 20,000. After 67 hours, they found 15. The computer found all 20 of them in 20 milliseconds!
Simultaneous Access
Anyone on the system can access (at any time) any documents for which they have access privileges.
File Continuity
With a paper file, if someone removes a document and forgets to replace it—or puts it back in the wrong place—the next person will never find it. In an electronic system, once a document is filed, it stays filed.
Tracking Access and Use
Using electronic files, management can keep track of how often people access certain records. If, for example, it is found that 20% of the records are being accessed 80% of the time, managers can optimize the storage of those files to further increase access speeds and reduce cost.
Document Life
Electronic storage on CD-ROM is good for 50 to 100 years. Paper gradually ages—or worse, gets smudged, torn, or catches fire.
Long Term Management
Having all documents electronically stored makes policies about archiving and destroying documents easier to implement.