The math behind Electronic Document Management

One of the key ideals behind Electronic Document Management is that it's supposed to save you money. The idea is that by eliminating some of the paper requirements you can cut down on supply and maintenance costs. It's one of those arguments that I've heard a number of times and to be honest I'd mostly ignored it.

My thought was that KNOWING you had electronic copies of each service order was well worth the investment and that the ongoing management and filing of these documents had such a time savings that the financial ramifications weren't as big a deal. Turns out I was wrong...

So here's the premise...

Each work order written inside of a Dealer Management System typically consists of 6 copies.

1 x Hard Copy approving the work.
1 x Technician Copy, so the tech's can note their work.
2 x Closing Copy, one for the customer, one for the dealership.
1 x Warranty Copy for the the manufacturer (if applicable).
1 x Accounting Copy, for the accounting system.

So, a store with 12 technicians doing 5 service orders per day would generate 360 documents per day.

12 techs x 5 service orders x 6 documents per service order = 360 documents

The same store, over the course of a year would generate almost 100,000 service documents.

360 documents per day x 5 days per week x 52 weeks per year = 93,600

Based on our experience each of these documents costs around 4 cents to print. When you take into account paper, toner, and printer wear and tear this adds up pretty quickly.

4 cents per document x 93,600 documents = $3,744 per year.

And these numbers are for an average sized shop!

I still believe that alot of the benefit behind electronic documents is the ability to better manage and store your information, but these kinds of figures do make a compelling financial argument.