Cost savings
One of the biggest hidden costs that paper-intensive businesses face is the time it takes to work with paper files. Say it takes a $20/hour employee five minutes to walk to a records room, locate a file, act on it, refile it, and return to his desk. At just four files per day, that's over 86 hours per year spent filing - around $1700 in wages. At ten files per day, that shoots up to 216 hours per year - over five weeks' time, or $4300 - and that's only for one employee. A system that lets employees find and work with those documents without ever leaving their desks can instantly slash those costs.
Electronic document management systems also eliminate the "lost document" cost - the time it takes to recreate a document that's been destroyed or misplaced. Some suppliers estimate the cost of replacing each lost document at $250.
Additional cost savings come from the office space that can be freed by eliminating most paper records. With real estate costs at $15 to $40 per square foot in many major cities, converting records rooms into usable office space can save considerable amounts of money. In other cases, you may be able to eliminate warehousing costs for years of old records.
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