There are some obvious places to look for ROI: printing costs, mail costs, etc. These can add up too, and sometimes that justifies the whole transaction.

 

Time is the real saver though. When you talk to a President or CEO and ask them how long it takes them to retrieve a particular document, their answer is going to be a look different than a clerk. The executive tells someone to get the information, goes about their day, and it shows up. Pretty fast isn’t it?

 

What they don’t always see is the 45 minutes that admin spent finding (because it wasn’t where it was supposed to be), copying, and refilling the document (in the right place this time).   And this goes on all the time in most organizations. If it’s important enough, multiple people are pulled off task to dig through boxes. And while they are digging through boxes, they are not taking customer calls, collecting receipts, or processing invoices. They’ve gone from producing revenue to costing the company money

 

The other thing that the president may not see is the additional “water cooler” time that accumulates during these tasks. The stop to chat with a friend or colleague, or to complain how long it took them to find that $30 invoice from 6 months ago. For the most part, they are on the clock, and getting paid the exact same amount of money.

 

Take an example of someone making $15.00 per hour, and assume that with benefits the total burden rate is $20.00 per hour. Let’s say that this person is collecting your receivables.  Assume that they need to access files on a regular basis, let’s say twice a day. From determining the need for a file, to retrieving, to chat with their pal, and the time it takes to copy and put it back, it takes 8 minutes each time (and that’s probably conservative). That’s 16 minutes, or about $10 per day. Assuming someone works 2,000 hours per year that yields 250 days. Simple math comes to $2,500 per year pulling paper. Now let’s say that you have three people in and out of files, that’s $7,500 per year.

 

And while you are spending that money, they are not collecting receivables. What is the value of them making one more call? 

 

You can run through this scenario in almost any department. Time spent searching for paper, or e-mail is an avoidable waste. Even well run companies have work that doesn’t get done. Imagine being able to get more out of the staff you have.

 

Since I’ve been at Fisher’s we’ve had three administrative people leave for understandable reasons. We’ve streamlined our processes, and yes we did it largely by implementing DocuWare, to the point where we replaced those positions with one person. 

 

There’s a real ROI there.