Digital Landfill

10 Fast Facts About Document Management

Pam Doyle’s (Pam is from Fujitsu’s scanner group and a long-time AIIM ECM and ERM trainer) presentation at the AIIM road show in Chicago contained some “fast facts” about document management that I thought worth repeating.  I thought these reminders of DM value were particularly relevant given the coming tightening of IT resources:

1. 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.
2. 7.5 percent of all documents get lost; 3 percent of the remainder get misfiled.
3. Professionals spend 5 – 15 percent of their time reading information, but up to 50 percent looking for it.
4. The average document photocopied 19 times.
5. There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone and they are growing at a rate of 22% per year (PricewaterhouseCoopers).
6. Corporate users received an average of 18 megabytes (MB) of e-mail per day in 2007; E-mail is expected to grow to over 28 MB per day by 2011.
7. Users send and receive an average of 133 e-mail messages per day (Radicati Group).
8. A single FAX machine costs $6,200 per year (Captaris); the average time to manually FAX a document is 8 minutes.
9. The average cost to send a package via courier service is between $8 and $15.
10. The cost of office space has increased 19% (Office Space Across the World 2008).