Is electronic records management worth the effort? Advocates argue that digital records make electronics records management faster and most cost-efficient while facilitating increased productivity. But are those claims smoke-and-mirrors, or are they grounded in evidence and fact?
Let’s look at some hard numbers.
The number of documents and records in the U.S. alone is staggering
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) says it holds around 13.28 billion pages of textual records, among other types of records. It also says that it only keeps “those Federal records that are judged to have continuing value – about 2 to 5 percent of those generated in any given year.”
So, if NARA is holding 13 billion pages, that means the U.S. Federal government has cumulatively produced something on the order of 650 billion pages of text records.
And that approximated number may even be low! Ten years ago, consultancy firm PwC estimated that there are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S., and that number is growing annually at an rate of 22%. That means organizations are having to contend with more records than ever.
The productivity impacts of records management are huge and growing
Workers share an average of six documents daily. However, this fact doesn’t stand alone. Workers also spend an average of 18 minutes searching for every document. That’s nearly two hours of productivity lost per day per person, off the top.
Why so much time searching? The Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) says that 7.5% of all documents get lost and another 3% get misfiled. In other words, over one out of every ten documents ultimately become inaccessible but require searching to locate or to determine they are irretrievable.
Altogether, these facts may be why document-related issues account for 21% of daily productivity loss and why content sharing platform M-Files has found that “83% of workers have had to recreate a document which already existed because they were unable to find it on their corporate network.” It’s just all adds up to an incredible amount of waste and lost productivity.
Electronic Records Management systems help!
Here’s where digital solutions come in. By making it easier to collect, organize, search, and retrieve records, they can reduce errors that result in lost and misfiled records, reduce the amount of time spent searching for files, and reduce costs associated with paper records.
For example, converting to digital can improve staff productivity by up to 30%. The Aberdeen Group conducted a study of document management methodologies and found that errors can fall by as much as 30% and costs by as much as 10% when organizations use document management tools. Similarly, research from AIIM found that most businesses that switched to paperless document management achieved full ROI in under a year, and 84% achieved full ROI in less than 18 months. In other words, electronic records management tangibly and measurably improves productivity and cost efficiencies.
About PSL
PSL is a global outsource provider whose mission is to provide solutions that facilitate the movement of business-critical information between and among government agencies, business enterprises, and their partners. For more information, please visit or email info@penielsolutions.com.