Member Article

No More ‘Dockets in Pockets’

With the average UK business spending as much as £20,000 on posting invoices, there’s a huge financial incentive to going paperless. Here, we crunch the numbers:

What is “dockets in pockets“ syndrome?

Put simply, that moment when an important piece of paperwork goes missing:

“I forgot to enter our copy of the BoM into the ERP database“

“I lost the signed receipt for the goods“

“It’s not my job to keep track of paperwork“.

Often the missing document is literally in someone’s pocket.

Dockets in pockets – more than just an annoyance.

Lost paperwork costs in terms of wasted effort, duplicated work and potential financial penalties:

• An enterprise with 1,000 workers wastes between $2.5 and $3.5 million (about £1.6 - £2.2 million) per year chasing and recreating lost paperwork (IDC)
• The average employee wastes 30 minutes every day searching for files (BAE Systems)
• The average document gets copied 19 times. That’s 19 copies to lose (Coopers & Lybrand)
• Tracing a lost file costs $120 (about £75) (Coopers & Lybrand)
• Replacing a lost document costs $220 (about £140) in duplicated effort (Coopers & Lybrand)
• 7.5% of all documents get lost at some point. Another 3% get misfiled (Coopers & Lybrand)
• Dockets in pockets are costly. (Source: Document Management blog – DocPoint)

Solving the dockets in pockets dilemma with ERP software

With a suitable ERP system you can improve your workflow by:

• Replacing physical documents with electronic equivalents
• Automating document interchange internally and externally so you don’t rely on people to file them correctly
• Creating logical filing for documents in your ERP system against projects, orders, customers and suppliers so that everything can be retrieved quickly and easily from a central document store.

ERP projects can benefit a business by streamlining lenghty processes, for more insight about this topic you can read: Don’t Put It Off! Five Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Defer Your ERP Project. Copy and paste the link http://bit.ly/ERPprojects into your browser to view.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Paul Bywater .