In today’s economy, companies are always looking for ways to make their organizations run more efficiently. Very often that means becoming more competitive by providing employees with tools so they can work as efficiently as possible. With tightening budgets and demanding economic environments, companies attempting to go digital must pay close attention to the costs of new technologies while keeping their return-on-investment a top priority.
Time Saved Means Money Made
Labor is one of the largest expenses for most companies. Making copies, manually routing documents and hunting for lost paper items is time-consuming, inefficient and requires repetitive steps. Making the management of your workflow digital reduces the time and costs for completing these tasks. Employees can use electronic tools to quickly search for information and complete customer service tasks with ease.
A full-time working day amounts to 40 hours per week and up to 30 hours for part-time. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) conducted research for the period of 2012-2016, showing that the average amount of time that individuals worked was 6.89 hours (out of 8) per day and 34.9 hours (out of 40) per week. Average entry-level salaries for workers range from $8 to $12 per hour depending on the job title. The median is $10 an hour – $349 per week per employee.
Our repeat customers shared their experiences and their overall numbers demonstrated that using PDFfiller’s digital workflow solution saved them 37.8% of working hours per week totaling $132 per employee per week.
Paperless Solutions Make You Money
One major area of cost for companies receiving scrutiny is paper-based business systems. Research conducted by the Gartner Group recognized the components of digital process management as top technology priorities for businesses. A major advantage of using paperless process management is avoiding lost or missing documents as well as the costs incurred for losing a document, costing an average of $500 per document to replace.
Paper and its related expenses are one of the highest budgeted items for a company. Every year about 880 billion documents are printed, faxed, stored and copied. Every employee in America produces up to 10,000 paper documents per year. PDFfiller’s statistics showed that companies using digital workflow solutions saved 2/3 on their physical paper budgets.
Bonus Benefits
Another type of cost associated with offices revolves around the “soft dollar” or intangible savings. Benefits such as increased market share, higher employee retention and the ability to bring products to market faster may not easily translate as cost reductions.
Benefits that tend to be ignored in hard-dollar ROI discussions include customer service. According to IDC research, yearly growth rates in customer satisfaction of online digital workflow solutions tops out at 96%. With a manual system, companies have to constantly keep track of purchase orders, requisitions, and invoices. It’s time-consuming and creates a higher chance of important items being missed or overlooked. Digital process management improves customer relations because it dramatically reduces the time-frame for information-finding, produces invoices faster and keeps employees updated allowing for faster turnarounds with vendors and customers.
A digital workflow management solution automatically prompts users to take advantage of vendor discounts and encourages earlier, faster and more efficient invoicing. This shortens the average time-frame of closing a deal from 6-14 days to minutes and lowers the amount of friction for closing a transaction by more than 5%. IDC research shows that implementing digital process management can increase employee efficiency and productivity by as much as 64%.
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