Research conducted by Xerox in the 1970s showed that companies spent as much as 12% to 15% of corporate turnover on the management of documents, with a large chunk of this used to manage active files.
Given the information overload of recent years, this figure is probably higher now, and especially so in document-intensive industries, such as financial services and government.
Considering the turnover of a multibillion-rand organisation, outsourcing this function could save the business millions of rand, or a multimillion-rand company hundreds of thousands of rand.
While there is a move towards the paperless office, because of the information overload, most companies are drowning in paper now more than ever.
Managing documents is non-core to most companies and should be outsourced to professionals, who have specialist software, a central repository of live files, and trained people to manage the process.
Office space is also very expensive, making space management, efficient storage and regular purging important.
Documents past the active stage of their lifecycle are probably the easiest to manage, as they can be sent off-site to a specialist service provider or stored in a company`s own archives.
Retrieval of these documents is infrequent. The issue here is minimising storage costs and making sure there is as little human intervention as possible, which is relatively easily managed.
Very few organisations are in the business of shuffling paper around.
Paul Mullon, Marketing director, Metrofile
A bigger challenge is managing live physical files. Documents need to be moved from person to person, from a storage area, among different people, and acted on - the difficulty here is making sure they get to where they should be at the right time without being lost, damaged or misfiled.
The problem is compounded by the fact that few people in an organisation are trained to manage live files, and even fewer are trained to understand proper indexing and filing technologies. Few organisations have the corporate culture, technology and mindset to handle this task properly.
The function is generally palmed out to the person who happens to be free at the time, and who almost always lacks the correct skills to handle the task. Because handling documents is not core to most businesses, and is not a high priority, little effort is devoted to proper training methodologies and implementations.
For those companies that do give it a cursory thought, the best one can expect is poor systems, duplicates of documents, misfiling, lost documents and the potential for damage of some sort due to litigation or lost contracts.
One of the temptations for companies is to buy electronic document management systems. However, unless the organisation has the correct corporate mindset and culture, very seldom does this deliver the expected results.
The alternative approach that does work for almost any organisation is to outsource the management of live files to a specialist.
The two primary objectives this achieves is firstly allowing an organisation to focus on its core business, and secondly to gain cost savings and productivity improvements, and better corporate governance by ensuring the company that it outsources to has the requisite skills to undertake the function properly.
Most companies usually err with seemingly simple tasks like effective shelf space utilisation, document type categorisation, indexing and movement and return of files to the correct place. The only way to get these tasks right is to employ properly trained specialist staff or outsource the function. The latter delivers cost savings.
A specialist company can port the experience gained in one industry to other industries, so the company outsourcing document handling can benefit from the experience the service provider brings to the table.
The use of barcoding, not normally associated with manual processes such as the movement of paper, is also brought to bear, as physical file tracking software can generally manage documents in and out of various locations.
The outsource company also continually upgrades its systems, such as software and processes, so it always has a better way of handling documents and can apply these in terms of best practice and technological methodologies.
In managing documents through their transition from being live to semi-active or in the archive state, the outsource company can ensure the process is smooth. As soon as a document is ready to move it happens automatically after a period of time, such as not being active for a month or two or even six months, depending on company-specific processes. It can be automatically moved off-site, without the client company having to give it a moment`s thought.
The destruction of documents is also important. A specialist records management company will have a process in place to identify those documents that are due to be destroyed, verify that they should be destroyed and ultimately destroy them under a defined, auditable process.
Very few organisations are in the business of shuffling paper around. Research shows that the management of documents is a massive overhead for companies, so it makes sense to achieve cost savings and productivity improvements by outsourcing this function.
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