"The least expensive way to to store a document is in a box on a shelf. The most expensive way to retrieve a document is from a box on a shelf."

A recent Pricewaterhouse Coopers study, reported in Conquer Information Chaos, October 29, 2008 stated: “Organizations still spend on average $20 to file a document, $120 to find a lost document, and $220 to replace a lost document, while losing 7.5% of their documents and misfiling 3%."

According to Coopers & Lybrand:

19 copies are made from each paper document
7.5% of paper documents are lost completely
$120.00 is spent on labor searching for the misfiled paper documents
$250.00 is spent on labor to search for lost files
There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. and growing at 22% per year.

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) shows storage costs per MegaByte as follows:

The Gartner Group - Jan. 21, 2002
Disaster Recovery Requires Document Management

"Most large enterprises have back- up and disaster recovery plans… however, today's business also depends upon business documents, many of which are held as paper copies and are not backed- up"

A loss of a business' unprotected records would be devastating and may have critical effects daily business processes. An implementation of a ECM solution would virtually eliminate the risk of losing documents.

- Paper documents cost approximately .09 cents per page.
- An estimated 40 % of all copied and reprinted pages are from sources previously printed.
- Of the estimated $350 billion spent annually on extra or reprinted copies, $130 billion isn't needed.
- Surveys show that professionals spend up to 50% of their time searching for information and only 10% of their time reading it.

Consider the following:

On Average each employee maintains one filing cabinet (15,000-20,000 pieces of paper) and will spend an hour to 2 hours searching for their documents each day.

That equates to approximately 240 to 480 hours per year for each employee. At an average of 360 hours per year and a wage of $10 per hour = $3,600 per employee, per year.
An organization with 40 employees spends $144,000 each year searching for documents.

A single filing cabinet occupies 10 square feet of office space. An organization with 100,000 documents with an average of 10 pages per document equates to 1,000,000 total pages. This would require 50 filing cabinets. It is estimated the annual maintenance of 50 file cabinets in employee hours would equate to $90,000 to $240,000. The cost of the filing cabinets @ $400 each would equal $20,000.00
Annual office space cost @ $1.75/foot per month = $10,500.00.
Minimum total cost to organization would be $130,500 to $270,500 Annually