For office managers and employees, the sight of a stack of papers piling up on a desk is an iconic symbol of a nightmare. It usually signifies a very long day—and night—in the office.
In reality, however, a stack of paper poses a much bigger problem than the work that is required to move it. And while many companies are starting to wake up to this problem and go digital, others are still clinging to an antiquated way of doing business—by refusing to give up paper and pencil tactics.
Paper is, above all other factors, expensive. And it is expensive because it is inefficient. The chain of expenditures begins with how much it costs to actually purchase paper. In fact, it costs an organization roughly $25,000 to fill a four-drawer filing cabinet, explains InfinityQS vice president of technical services Doug Fair in a “Manufacturing Engineering” article. Aside from the cost of paper, however, is the labor associated with maintaining it. File cabinet maintenance costs about $2,100 per year. This also breaks down to $20 in labor for the filing of each document.
Further complications arise when considering the amount of time it takes to locate such documents. Paper documents must be passed along, mailed and filed. And it can take weeks in the mail for a document to arrive. With a system such as InfinityQS ProFicient manufacturing quality software, results are delivered instantaneously. And those results can be accessed at any point on the globe, at any time, from a remote location.
You can’t do that with a file cabinet.
So, why overpay for an inefficient and outdated system? Offices lose one out of every 20 documents, and it costs a company $120 in labor to search for each missing piece of paper.
To read Fair’s article in its entirety, click here. For more information on ProFicient software, click here.