Understanding the True Cost of Legacy Document Management Systems

Is your organization still spending hours each week or month searching through paper documents for needed information or, just as inefficiently, trying to remember which limited, cloud-based repository you used for supposedly "easy" file storage? If so, you're losing out in a big way.  

Consider the following three ways in which having an insufficient or outdated legacy system (or no system at all) for your business' document management needs is costing you a lot more than you may think.

The Staggering Cost of Your Valuable Time

The average office worker spends approximately 2.5 hours each workday looking for information, according to a 2001 seminal whitepaper on the subject by market research firm IDC. (Considering the sheer volume of data that has been added to the mix since the turn of the century, is it likely that number has decreased at all?)

If 2.5 hours per day doesn't seem all that bad, think about it this way. Assuming a 5-day work week, that amounts to 650 hours per year per employee spent just searching for information, not generating revenue, not servicing customers, not propelling your business forward. Adding insult to injury,  if (and when) said office workers can't locate the sought-after information, they have to recreate it as best they can. 

Susan Feldman shared the following in a piece for KMWorld:

"Recent research on knowledge work shows that knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out information that does not already exist. Some studies suggest that 90% of the time that knowledge workers spend in creating new reports or other products is spent in recreating information that already exists."

With a top-of-the-line document management system, an organization can take those hours back and go a long way toward ensuring that the searched-for information is actually located. Ripcord's user-friendly Canopy platform, for example, is a scalable system capable of scanning in and digitizing huge volumes of paper files, making them secure, cloud-based, and highly searchable at a granular level. 

The Wasted Money

All that fruitless searching when you lack a sound document management system or use an anachronistic one instead isn't just a time drain; it's draining your company's finances, too. The cost of not being able to locate information when said information is needed is astronomical. The same IDC whitepaper estimates that an enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers loses $2.5 million per year due to an inability to locate and retrieve information. The same enterprise may lose up to $5 million per year duplicating or recreating information that already exists but cannot be easily found due to poor document management practices.  

Using Canopy, organizations can reclaim that cash and more. A large insurance company that recently contracted with Ripcord to digitize multiple warehouses' worth of documents could realize a savings of millions of dollars each year in coming years, even after the outlay on digitizing. How? It had been spending more than $6 annually just to keep its paper documents in boxes, on shelves and maintained by full-time staff.  

The Cost of Poor Document Security

Lately, it's been digital data theft that's gotten the lion's share of media attention, but the truth is that in recent years most personal information pilfering has been of the non-digital variety (the kind that includes information recorded on paper). 

Further, in the COVID-19 era, millions of people will remain working from home or otherwise remotely for the foreseeable future. Shipping paper documentation from city to city, state to state, or even country to country is economically unfeasible, and it's a security nightmare. What if sensitive information is lost en route? Who knows where that data could end up?

Eliminate these potential security risks to your business and its employees by digitizing your organization's documents. With Canopy, each client's data is stored in the client's own, secure, cloud-based instance, where it is encrypted and stored safely away from would-be hackers.

Now, more than ever, businesses must move toward digital transformation to meet the demands of the modern business landscape. Any other choice is just too costly in the long run. Learn more about Ripcord and how our team of experts can help your organization make the move to digitized document management today.