According to recent estimates, it takes a typical office worker 12 minutes to process a single document. Nine of these 12 minutes are spent searching for, retrieving and re-filing the document — meaning that only three minutes are spent actually using the information they’ve found.

The volume of paper documents processed by businesses has increased tenfold in the last five years. Increases in paper volume drive up the cost of paper handling, which greatly reduces profit margins.

Digital document management can help you deal with the rapidly-increasing burden of creating and maintaining your company’s paper archives. By reliably managing and protecting the documents that support organisational processes, inform organisational choices and preserve organisational knowledge, document management solutions increase efficiency, support profit-building activities and provide a balance between security and accessibility.

A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers’ report found that the average employee spends 40 percent of their time managing non-essential documents. The International Data Corporation estimates that employees spend 20 percent of their day searching for information in hardcopy documents, and that 50 percent of the time they are unable to find what they are looking for.

With document management, your employees can spend their time meeting the needs of your current customers and acquiring new ones, instead of wasting it searching for information or pushing paper. A document management system can help your business save time by:

• Answering information requests immediately, eliminating call-backs and rounds of phone tag.
• Responding quickly to auditors’ requests for information.
• Immediately locating documents and highlighting essential information.
• Eliminating lost documents that must be recreated and re-filed.
• Spending less time filing and archiving documents.
• Cutting time spent copying and distributing documents to staff, branch offices and outside contacts.
• Speeding up your document-handling workflow by enabling automation.