Fun Facts about Paper in the Office PDF Print E-mail

 fc-man-papers.jpg

  • There are 4 trillion paper documents in the USA, growing at 22% each year.
  • 90% of all corporate memory exists on paper.
  • The average cost to find a lost document is $122.
  • It costs $220 in labor to reproduce that same document.
  • In the nation’s 17,500 courts, on average, over 85 million cases are filed each year - generating more than 1.5 billion documents.
  • It is estimated that over $11 billion is spent on distributing paper documents from one legal firm to another and to clients.
  • Over $2.5 billion is spent annually warehousing legal hardcopy documents.
  • Up to 10% of staff costs are lost because employees can't find the right information to do their jobs.
  • Employees performing ineffective searches and wasting time looking for information can cost companies up to 10% in salary expenses.
  • Over 50% of staff costs are now allocated to employees performing so-called information work.
  • The typical information worker now spends up to one-quarter of his or her day searching for the right information to complete a given task.
  • 90% of business information still exists on paper.
  • 20% to 40% of workers time is wasted searching for documents.
  • Of all documents that get handled each day, 90% are shuffled.
  • The average document gets copied 19 times.
  • The US is approaching 4 trillion documents being stored by businesses and government agencies and growing at a rate of 22% per year.
  • Professional spend 5-15% reading information, but up to 50% looking for it.
  • Every 12 filing cabinets require an additional employee to maintain them.
  • 7.5% of all documents get lost and 3.0% get misfiled .
  • 18 minutes is the average search time for a document.
  • More than 70% of today’s businesses would fail within 3 weeks if they suffered a catastrophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or floods.
  • Each four-drawer file cabinet takes up to 9 sq. ft. of floor space at a cost of $1,500 per year.
  • It costs $39,000 per year to file and retrieve 100 paper documents per day.

Sources:

Coopers and Lybrand 2004
Canon USA 2006
IDC
Delphi Group
Butler Group, Richard Edwards