Benchmark Your Time against the Average: Discover How Much Time Businesses Are Wasting with Inefficient Document Management
Digital file storage is convenient for today’s on-the-go world, but it only takes a single slip of the finger to misplace data. Without careful attention, employees are likely to misname or misfile critical data such as financial spreadsheets, legal documents, contract PDFs, and expense receipt photos. Document management problems like these happen all the time.
Consider: How many minutes have you spent this month watching someone search for a document during a Zoom call? It is frustrating and a waste of your time to wait as they hunt through file after file. Worst of all, it is something your employees are falling prey to as well – and that wastes your company’s time.
Find out how much time all that misplaced data is wasting. Check out the infographic, “10 Hidden Consequences of Information Sprawl & Inefficient Workflows.”
Poor Document Management Is a Problem That’s Like a Ticking Time Bomb
Does it feel like you spend more time waiting around for people to find data these days? That’s not an illusion. Since the amount of data is doubling every 1.2 years, inefficient document management and filing methods are guaranteed to waste more and more of your company’s time every 14.5 months.
This means that in 5 years, you are likely to be spending 4x as much time waiting on people to find critical data – unless you do something about it now.
The “10 Hidden Consequences of Information Sprawl” infographic gets you the facts behind the time wasted by inefficient filing, including:
- How often employees are recreating documents because they couldn’t find the original
- The number of employees who feel it is challenging and time consuming to find data
- How many tens of thousands of dollars are wasted on document issues
- The average time it takes to find a single document
- How many tens of millions of dollars are being lost in productivity costs
The infographic also clearly shows the real revenue impact of inefficient document management, including the hidden costs behind all this wasted time. Looking at how much this adds up to can be a sobering experience.
Why Is So Much Data Getting Misplaced or Lost Now?
Files have always been tough to organize, and it has always been easy to lose them. But in the past, it didn’t take as long to find missing files because there were fewer places to search for them. If you are old enough to remember when the business world was filled with file cabinets, think of how many 4-drawer cabinets your company had: maybe 5? To store digital files, today’s typical business requires a lot more virtual “file cabinet” space.
Here’s some back-of-the-envelope math to help you visualize the sheer space those files take up:
ILM Corp, a file digitizing company, estimates that each 4-drawer filing cabinet can hold approximately 375 MB of data if you think of it as just being filled with paper sheets of documents. After we learned this, we looked up a file we use all the time at our company (not our largest file by any means). Compared to other files, this one held a relatively modest 19 GB, which equated to approximately 51 file cabinets worth of documents.
And that was just one file.
If we misplace an important document and have to search for it across 51 file cabinets, it sure will take a lot more time than it would have to search through 5 file cabinets. To find data faster, many companies are turning to automated document management solutions, like M-Files, which leverages AI metadata classification to prevent time wasters like misfiling or misnaming data.
Curious how much time you could save?
Access the infographic and find out.
Since 2003, PeopleSense has established itself as the definitive ERP and single source workforce management solution provider for businesses of all sizes throughout the U.S. and Canada, offering consulting for Made2Manage® (M2M®) and Intuitive®, Sage HRMS, time and attendance solutions, Acumatica, and related services and products. PeopleSense provides clients with the peace of mind that comes from working with experienced consultants dedicated to customer service, who are affordably priced with no annual contracts. Reach out to get your business software questions answered.