The average American worker uses almost 10,000 sheets or about two boxes of paper a year according to the Resource Conservation Alliance In Washington DC, this number does not include any paper used for magazines, newspapers, and personal use. while according to International digital edition we use over 786 million trees just to keep the world on paper for one year. Over the years, studies have shown that paper consumption continues to grow. ForestEthics.com indicates that consumption increases by 20% year after year.
Many companies don’t even include paper as a line item in their annual budgets; this may be a mistake, as these same companies do not recognize the true cost of paper. When evaluating the actual cost, we must also consider storage, lost documents, scrap, and labor costs. Let’s look a little more at these pieces of the puzzle, storage, for example; in an average office with 50 people on site and average document flow, approximately 200 filing cabinets, which takes up an additional 2,400 square feet of office space (based on 12 square feet each) to contain what is in flow today and over $40,000 in additional costs for the cabinets. Those same documents could fit on a single server and significantly reduce the cost. In fact, they could reduce your physical footprint along with costs. With prime real estate going for over $2.00 per square foot, even in these tough times, the monthly savings would be $4800 per month or nearly $58,000 per year. For many small and medium-sized businesses, this could be the cost of an additional employee, which could mean little or no reduction in your workforce.
Next, we need to look at the cost of labor. We will use the same office in this example. These same 50 people spend approximately 1.5 hours a day generating, filing, and accessing paper, which includes having to recreate documents that also go missing. These employees earn an average of $30 per hour, with some executives earning significantly more. They spend a combined 75 hours a day touching paper. This is costing the company $2,250 a day, $49,500 on the low end a month, or nearly $600,000 in salary a year to play the part. Beyond the cost of labor and storage, cost per impression (CPP) must also be considered. The average CPP is $0.015 and includes toner, paper, and minimal maintenance. This does not include the cost of the printer or major repairs like battery kits, etc. With an average of 10,000 sheets per office worker, this office generates 42,000 documents per month, or just over half a million sheets per year. At $0.015 CPP they are spending $630.00 a month or $7500 a year.
If we could cut each of these costs in half, this company would be saving $332,750 per year in real estate, salary, and CPP or $27,729.16 per month. With the introduction of digital document management into their environment, this company would begin to see immediate ROI and could reduce costs and increase productivity.
additional investigations of PricewaterhouseCoopersshows the time spent on paper in a typical organization today:
o 90% of all pages handled each day in the average office are simply shuffled.
o The average document is copied 19 times.
o 7.5 percent of all documents are lost, the rest 3 percent are misfiled.
o Professionals spend 5 to 15 percent of their time reading information and up to 50 percent of their time searching for it.
o There are more than 4 trillion paper documents in the US alone, growing at a rate of 22 percent per year.
Considering these numbers with the others mentioned above, it is vitally important that companies start looking at the cost of paper in their organizations and what they can do to reduce it, not only to align their budgets but also to help our global environment. . situation too.