Are you still using paper and spreadsheets to record and track critical information about your business? You're not alone! Document management experts estimate that 40% of corporate data still resides on paper or in an unstructured format! For industries that are traditionally slower to adapt, like Life Sciences, that figure might be much higher.
If your business specializes in manufacturing related to biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, biomedical technologies, or biomedical devices, your document trail responds to a variety of complex demands, including document management, investigations/CAPAs, training, audits, and supplier management.
What is the true cost of your Paper-Based Quality Management System?
What do we know about the life cycle of a document, either on paper or in an electronic format? To begin with, waste and cost occur at the most basic level: retrieval.
In a highly efficient paper-based filing system, it takes an average of 6 minutes to retrieve and refile a document. If files are at the desks of remote employees or remote sites instead of a central filing cabinet, that timing goes out the window. And what if you can't find the document at all?
Now imagine you need multiple documents to analyze their data? Multiply that 6 minutes by the number of files, and in addition, add the time it takes to locate data within those files and create a mechanism to correlate it for analysis. You can quickly see where this is heading -- the amounts of money spent on lost productivity is staggering.
Paper management experts note these statistics:
- Companies spend $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document.
- 5 percent of all documents get lost, 3 percent of the remainder get misfiled.
- Professionals spend 5-15 percent of their time reading information but up to 50 percent looking for it.
- There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone, growing at a rate of 22 percent per year.
Think about that for a minute. In a perfect world, with no filing errors, no misplaced documents, and no lost documents, if you needed to retrieve and refile 50 corporate documents in a day, it would cost you 5 hours per day and $75 a day at $15/hour for 250 working days per year. That's $18,750/year spent searching inside the most efficient manual document management system.
As computers reduce the need for administrative assistants, leaving professionals to handle their own work, that hourly figure increases as higher level professionals spend time inputting and retrieving documents instead of focusing on more important tasks.
The example above is just a simplistic idea of the amount of waste involved in a paper-based system. This quick view doesn't even begin to address using those records for sophisticated analysis of business trends or issues of quality control. It doesn't deal with tracking down bottlenecks in the system or ensuring that you can implement and monitor timely CAPAs when you find them. Collaboration both inside and outside an organization has limits due to the difficulty of accessing a common record or dealing with changes and revisions systematically. It's simply not possible to do these tasks effectively in a paper-based system.
Additionally, home-grown or paper-based systems add undue risk given the demands of today’s regulators and customers. Accountability and compliance are time-consuming operations in a paper-based environment.
Consider this: There are 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone. It's mind-boggling to think about. Consider the cost of all that paper packed into desks and drawers and the time involved in drawing meaningful, coordinated information from it.
ZenQMS offers an efficient, cost-effective way to immediately improve your quality profile. Our cloud-based platform provides global access to all our modules, including our document management system, without seat license restrictions. ZenQMS facilitates collaboration with remote sites and employees, and handles virtual audits with ease. Our software is easy to implement, validate, and use, because it was built for the general user in mind.
You'll never have to hunt for an important document or chase down a signature again. If your current paper-based document management system has become overwhelming, contact us, we can help.