No More ‘Dockets in Pockets’: an Operations Director’s Guide to the Paper Free Office [INFOGRAPHIC]
Document management is often overlooked as an ERP function, a very costly mistake...
With the average UK business spending as much as £20,000 on posting invoices, there’s a huge financial incentive to going paperless. Here, we crunch the numbers:
What is “dockets in pockets” syndrome?
Put simply, that moment when an important piece of paperwork goes missing:
- “I forgot to enter our copy of the BoM into the ERP database”
- “I lost the signed receipt for the goods”
- “It’s not my job to keep track of paperwork”.
Often the missing document is literally in someone’s pocket.
Dockets in pockets – more than just an annoyance.
Lost paperwork costs in terms of wasted effort, duplicated work and potential financial penalties:
- An enterprise with 1,000 workers wastes between $2.5 and $3.5 million (about £1.6 - £2.2 million) per year chasing and recreating lost paperwork (IDC)
- The average employee wastes 30 minutes every day searching for files (BAE Systems)
- The average document gets copied 19 times. That’s 19 copies to lose (Coopers & Lybrand)
- Tracing a lost file costs $120 (about £75) (Coopers & Lybrand)
- Replacing a lost document costs $220 (about £140) in duplicated effort (Coopers & Lybrand)
- 7.5% of all documents get lost at some point. Another 3% get misfiled (Coopers & Lybrand)
Dockets in pockets are costly. (Source: Document Management blog – DocPoint)
Takeaways: Solving the dockets in pockets dilemma with ERP software
With a suitable ERP system you can improve your workflow by:
- Replacing physical documents with electronic equivalents
- Automating document interchange internally and externally so you don’t rely on people to file them correctly
- Creating logical filing for documents in your ERP system against projects, orders, customers and suppliers so that everything can be retrieved quickly and easily from a central document store.
Does your business suffer from “dockets in pockets” syndrome? Let us know below!
Topics: Document Management, ERP software, Paperless Office