The average American worker uses almost 10,000 sheets or approximately two cases 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 Digital Publishing International we use more than 786 million trees just to keep the world in paper for one year. Over the years, studies have shown that paper consumption continues to grow. ForestEthics.com indicates that consumption is up by 20% year over year.
Many companies do not even include paper as a line item in their yearly budgets; this can be a mistake, since these same companies fail to recognize the true cost of paper. In evaluating the true cost we must also look at the storage, lost documents, waste, and labor costs. Let's look at these pieces of the puzzle a little further, storage for example; in an average office with 50 people on site and an average document flow, 200 or so file cabinets, taking up additional office space of 2400 sq ft to hold what is in flow today and over $40,000 in additional costs for the cabinets. Those same documents could fit on to a single server and reduce the cost significantly. They would actually be able to reduce their physical foot print along with costs. With prime real estate costing upwards of $2.00 sq ft, even in these tough times, the monthly savings would be $4800 a month or almost $58,000 a year. For many small to mid size companies, this could be the cost of an additional employee.
Next we should look at the cost within the workforce. We will use the same office in this example. These same 50 people spend approximately 1.5 hour a day generating, filing, and accessing paper. This excludes having to recreate documents that get misplaced as well. These employees can earn an average of $30 an hour, with some executives earning significantly more. They are spending a combined total of 75 hours a day touching paper. This is costing the company 42,250 a day, $49,500 on the low end a month or almost $600,000 in salary a year to touch paper. Beyond the labor and storage cost, cost per print (CPP) needs to be looked at as well. The average CPP is $0.015 to include toner, paper, and minimal maintenance. This does not include the cost of the printer or major repairs like drum kits, etc. Using the average of 10,000 sheets per office worker average, this office generates 42,000 documents a month or just overall half million sheets of paper a year. At $0.015 CPP they are spending $630 a month or $7500 a year.
If we could reduce each of these costs just by half, this company would be saving $332,750 a year in real estate, salary, and CPP or $27,729 a month. With the introduction of digital document management in their environment this company would begin to see an immediate ROI and be able to reduce costs and increase productivity.
Further research from PricewaterhouseCoopers shows the time spent on paper in today's typical organization:
- 90% of all the pages that get handled each day in the average office are merely shuffled
- The average document gets copied 19 times
- .5% of all documents get lost, 3% of the remainder get misfield
- Professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information, and up to 50% of their time looking for it
- There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the US alone - growing at a rate of 2% a year
Source - http://ezinearticles.com/expert=Jill_Blutinger
Additional Statistics:
- Traditional documents cost about $30 each to create
- As much of 90% of an enterprise's total printing expenses may be invisible or uncontrolled
- A typical four-drawer file cabinet holds 15,000 - 20,000 pages, costs $37,000 to fill and $3,000 a year to maintain
- 85% of documents are never retrieved, 50% are duplicates and 60% are obsolete
- A typical misfiled or misplaced document costs from $180-375 to recreate
Source - http://www.eds.com/insights/whitepapers
Carbon Footprint Calculator for Printing: http://www.hp.com/large/ipg/ecological-printing-solutions/carbon-footprint-calc.html