ECM by Numbers

Capture and BPM ROI is a win-win

Every time we ask in our surveys about ROI for investments in scanning and capture, two things crop up. Firstly, 40%+ of organizations achieve payback in less than 12 months (one budget cycle) and 60%+ within 18 months, so it's a pretty good investment compared to much of IT.  Secondly, whether we ask in general terms about drivers, or specifically about financial returns, the better sharing of information and knowledge comes out right up there alongside the improvements in process productivity. So you win on hard dollar benefits, and win again on soft dollar benefits. The other interesting thing is that the much broader aspects of process throughput and quality improvement give a bigger perceived return  than the savings on data-keying alone. Download the full report here for free.

 

Less-paper offices - at last!

 
Well, after 20 years of document scanning, we finally got a survey result that suggests offices are using less paper! We measured changes in the use of paper and number of photocopies. Whilst it is still growing in 27% of responding organizations, in 39%, it is actually starting to fall. In the largest organizations it is still equally balanced, with no net increase or decrease, but that is a big improvement on previous surveys. Amongst those organizations with more extensive scanning and capture operations, a net 53% are seeing a reduction in paper use, reflecting their reduced dependency on paper, particularly photocopies.

Although reduced storage costs and environmental benefits are important, the survey shows that improved shareability and searchability of scanned documents is a far bigger benefit, followed by productivity savings from document-centric workflows. The full survey report is free to download here.