Is digital document management cost-effective for your business

1. Is digital document management cost-effective for your business? To determine the cost-effectiveness of a solution, you must compare the cost of your existing system with those implementing the new Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution. Current costs to consider in general include: •Document storage: file room, warehouse space, filing cabinet, binder, shelf, and other related hardware costs. •Document creation: paper and toner delivery, postage, shipping delivery, and printing costs. •Document handling: the cost of manually rooting paper documents within the organization, such as postal or courier service; Additional costs include maintaining files and destroying outdated information. •Employee time: The productive burden of constantly storing and retrieving documents in a time-consuming manner, especially if stored off-site. On the other side of the cost-benefit equation, you have the costs of a new document management system. These may include: • Implementation: Advance costs for licensing document management software and purchasing additional hardware, such as scanners. Changing business processes, integrating

2. document management solutions with existing infrastructure, and additional costs of potential business interruptions during implementation. • Usage: training and education of users and system administrators, as well as temporary loss of employee performance when learning new software. • Maintenance: Data backup and hardware maintenance. When you are trying to decide if going digital is cost-effective for your business, it is important to weigh these current and potential costs. But those are hardly the only factors. Often, companies only think about these difficult costs and conclude that digital is not worth going. Switching to digital document management can save you $ 400 to $ 500 a month on these items. But unless you have very heavy paper-based business processes and operations, these savings alone do not provide reliable ROI. Understanding the value of 'soft ROI' Much of the value of document management comes in the form of soft ROI with better performance and productivity. That's why medium-sized business owners and other decision- makers need to evaluate the value of long-term investments away from the underlying cost when considering a document management solution. For example, we say that adopting a document management system helps you provide accurate information to your customers instantly, improving customer satisfaction. While it's a good idea to make customers happy, the goal of investing will be to make those happy customers spend more with your company. Now, the question is, how do you estimate the value of better customer service? What does it mean for your company's bottom line to improve your customer retention? Providing better customer service will increase your revenue by 10%, for example, document management would be worth thousands of dollars per month, instead of saving a few hundred dollars on difficult costs.

3. Finally, to accurately assess the cost-effectiveness of document management for your company, you need to assign ROI values to improve the performance of your business processes and access to your information. Adjusting the time saved, informed decision-making, and other value-added benefits can help you invest in technology that helps your company grow. BENEVOLENCE TECHNOLOGIES is a leader in Enterprise Information on Management (EIM) products services. Our EIM products enable businesses to grow faster, lower operational costs, and reduce information governance and security risks by improving business insight, impact, and process speed. We power digital transformations to empower the intelligent and connected enterprise.