The Evolution of Paper

Kim Owens, Account Manager, BroadPoint Technologies

Humans first started documenting information on stone. Egyptians then created paper made from the reed of the Nile River. Thousands of years later, we are evolving away from our dependency on paper because of the time and the costs involved.

We have seen this evolution before with the introduction of computers to the workplace. They allowed offices to operation efficiently by eliminating mistakes caused by human error and reducing overhead costs because of time intensive tasks. We can now print out reports on demand which once took hours to produce. So why are we still spending hours performing manual tasks when it comes to managing our paper? Wouldn’t it be easier to manage the documents essential to our business electronically?

According to the October 9^th, 2009 issue of The Economist, the paperless office is finally a reality. In order to understand the reason for the push to paperless, let’s look at some staggering statistics:

• We spend 20-30% of our time each day is spent filing, search and retrieving information
• It costs $20 to file a document, $120 to find a misfiled document and $220 to replace a lost document
• The average document is copied 19 times in its live
• It costs $25,000 to fill a four drawer cabinet
• 1 out of 10 documents is lost or misfiled

How much money is pushing paper costing your company and how much is the technology to correct it? Just like the introduction of computers, new affordable technology is also driving the paperless revolution. Storage space on servers is inexpensive compared to 30 years ago and the costs of scanners have dropped significantly in the past decade. For example, you can store 400,000 documents on $80 of disk space compare to $75,000 in 1973.

Document Management and Electronic Workflow software doesn’t have to be expensive either. PaperSave delivers a seamlessly integrated solution with Dynamics built on SharePoint starting at only $5,000 for the first 3 users. So manage the information that drives your business, not the paper. To learn more on PaperSave and how affordable document imaging and electronic workflow is for your company, register for a webcast on July 16^th or July 30^th.