Copiers or Document Management in Seattle?

There is a new buzz brewing with copier guys here in Seattle to provide document management to reduce printing costs.  The interesting thing is document management is least helpful in cutting printing costs and most helpful in controlling labor costs.

Here is how the sales pitch typically sounds. Make everything electronic and then you can get rid of most of your copiers.  Sounds good in theory, especially if you have 10 copiers that were all $8000 each.  Then it makes a lot of sense.  The problem is if you have 8 full sized copiers, you probably have 25 printers (average statistically and in the ballpark of 150 employees.)  A full document management system for that many employees can easily run $100,000.  There goes all the savings.  You cannot get out of the leases until they are over and still need high quality scanners and software for that as well.

Now, where you may see real savings in the process improvement we see with document management.  We have seen companies with 6 people in accounting be able to cut that number to 3 and redeploy the other 3 workers to other roles.  That can be $120,000 or more a year – so the one time fee of $100,000 and the approx maintenance costs of $20,000 a year can wind up saving $100,000 by year 2.  If you are thinking about document management for your Seattle company, don’t think about it to save on printing costs, there are far cheaper and better programs to accomplish that goal…  think about it to help cut labor costs.

If you want to chat about copiers, printers or document management in Seattle, give us a call!