• In most businesses each staff member spends approximately 5 hours per week looking for information. At an hourly rate of $21 per hour that adds up to over $5,000 per employee per annum. As the owner, can you afford to be looking for information at your hourly rate when there is an alternative?
• If you cannot answer a client’s request immediately, the cost is staggering and frightening! Did you know that telephone tag costs you an average of $936 per employee per year? As I am sure you already know many clients are lost due to poor response times to their requests.
• These days, staff come and go all the time. In many cases each time you lose a staff member, their acquired knowledge base walks out the door with them. Company growth is restricted due to knowledge coming and going. Often it is hard to easily transfer skill sets if the knowledge isn’t in a universal knowledge base.
• Lost documents can cost up to $100 each to recover.
• There is no back up of a paper-based system, and if it burns down and you cannot recover within a month you may be out of business within 1 year. A large percentage of businesses never recover from such a disaster. The U.S. Data Research Project University of Pennsylvania showed that 60% of companies with less than 50 staff, who were unable to restore lost data, closed within 6 months.
• There is generally no security for documents in an office, they are usually in an unlocked filing cabinet and the staff are simply trusted to do the right thing.
• Even with widespread computer usage, 70% of all documentation remains paper based. The average useable life-span of a document is only 30 to 90 days. Often they are never retrieved again after this time. Office space is at a premium though – and the more files you have the more space required which leaves less space for additional staff members to grow your business and/or higher rent for storage space. An average business creates 1 x 4-draw cabinet per staff member per year.
• If your filing system is paper based or stored within a Windows Explorer folder system then it can be very hard to bring your knowledge base together to make accurate business decisions. It can take the average employee from 30 minutes to 4 hours depending upon what they are looking for. Even then they will never be 100% sure that they have found all of the information. Valuable time is wasted under these traditional systems.
I have installed ManagePoint into 100’s of businesses and here are some of the benefits you can expect.
• Gain instant access to the precise information you need, when you need it
• Become super responsive to your customer needs
• Streamline your business, reduce major hidden expenses, and see productivity soar
• Eliminate duplication; ease the process of finding, using, & communicating information. Cut 200+ hours/year per employee from searching for information!
• Protect your most critical business asset – your information – from being wiped out by disaster, misplaced or stolen
You may never loose a document again, even in the event of “act of god” disasters. There is minimal disruption from employee turnover, and the security of your information, including privacy protection is comprehensively managed. While your competitors are still scratching their heads looking for client files, your fast-track business has already closed the deal with another satisfied customer.
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Do I really need a Document Management System?
This is how we have found most businesses work:
Documents are created or received, sent for action, filed, recovered, photocopied and then re-filed again many times during the first thirty to sixty days.
After that, they are often never seen again. Eventually files are archived off.
For legal reasons documents have to be kept for many years. But they just take up space and cost money to maintain.
Using ManagePoint, your information is created or received as it was in the past. It is then easily imported into your system. All documents can then be accessed or shared. You can share the information locally or globally. You can store 4 to 8, 4-drawer filing cabinets worth of documents in only one gigabyte of hard-drive space.
But you might be thinking..
“Do I really need a knowledge management system?”
I ask all my clients these questions:
1. Can you or your staff members quickly find any document instantly, at a moments notice, no matter when it was created or by whom?
2. How many times in the average work week, or work day for that matter, do you or your staff spend time searching for information you can't find? And how long do these search and rescue missions take?
3. Do you have a consistent and adhered to policy for labelling and storing documents?
4. Is it possible for your staff to view any document, no matter what application was used to create it? (E.g., Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Access, Outlook).
5. When looking at the title of a document, or a list of documents, can you immediately identify what the document is about?
6. Are you able to instantly pull up a list of documents related to a particular client, subject matter, or created by a specific Author?
7. Is it easy to pull together a diverse range of documents (Word documents, spreadsheets, legal agreements, and so on), that are dispersed throughout your organization?
8. Are you able to locate any document at any time, no matter what the subject or type of document or client or person who created it, from one easy search request on your PC?
9. Have you ever had a situation where the wrong (outdated) version of a document was worked on in error?
If you answered yes to some or all of these questions then ManagePoint can help
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Not all Document Management Systems are alike
Never consider a knowledge management system unless it:
• Is an open database, not a complex folder system. Because if you save a document in a folder and in a year you go to find it and have forgotten where you saved it or how you named it, it is often very hard to find. In a true knowledge management system you can search by any number of fields including keyword search for any word or number from within the document
• Can handle all documents in their native format
• Enables you to print, email, fax the documents direct from the system
• Has easy-to-use archiving tools for space saving data exports that can then be easily read if you need to review an archived document later
• Has easy-to-use virtual desk-tools (such as zooming in and out, flipping and shuffling the order of pages, highlighter pens, post-it notes, rubber stamps, digital signatures) so you may work on the document
• Gives you the ability to be able to copy part or all of your files to CD or DVD so you can easily share your information with others
• Produces detailed reports on the documents you have stored in the system
• Is secure and password protected
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How does it save money?
ManagePoint will easily save your business thousands of dollars each and every year. In addition, you will have instant access to the precise information you need, when you need it… every time! Be super responsive to your customer needs. Streamline your business while reducing one of your major hidden expenses. And most importantly, protect your most critical business asset – your information – from being wiped out by disaster, misplaced or stolen.
Designed specifically for business, ManagePoint has comparable functionality to a system which would cost a Fortune 500 company between $150,000 to $500,000. We bring the power of the big boys to you!
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