Unstructured document processes can have a hugely negative impact on business and, ultimately, cost companies unnecessary time and money. In fact, Gartner estimates that knowledge workers spend up to 50% of their time looking for specific content items and that each document takes, on average, 18 minutes to find.
“Furthermore, Coopers and Lybrand states that 15% of all paper documents are misfiled or misplaced,” explains Greg Griffith, product manager: business solutions at Konica Minolta South Africa, a division of Bidvest Office. “Searching for a piece of information for this length of time is actually equivalent to losing the document altogether, due to the labour costs associated with hunting a document down outweighing its average value.
“It is fairly simple to calculate the costs associated with unmanaged data; a business merely has to work out the wasted time employees spend searching for documents and multiply that by their salary – using the statistics mentioned above, it is clear that companies are wasting thousands and thousands of rands every year.”
To improve their document-based business processes, companies of all sizes and from all industrial sectors are looking at Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems as part of a managed content service (MCS) strategy. “Organisations are seeking to escape from their paper-based workflows and move towards digital business processes, targeting higher efficiencies and mobile access from everywhere,” says Griffith. “However, many businesses are still experiencing barriers to digitalisation, with the cost of printing being just one part of the entire document management process cost.”
Konica Minolta South Africa is able to support companies in decreasing operational expenses and delivering access to information in the most effective manner possible.
“There are serious efficiency gains to be made from improving document management throughout an enterprise, without significant capital expenditure.”
Konica Minolta’s MCS offering is tailored to the individual digital workflows of clients, aiming to increase their operating efficiency. “The first step is to understand the client’s business processes in terms of document management and the next is to implement improved processes, software and hardware,” he adds. “Once all that is in place, Konica Minolta helps the customer run his infrastructure and update it as needed. This approach takes the document management process in its entirety into account and is built on 10 years of expertise within this space.”
