hidden costs blow out from increased churn

Inefficiencies hidden within internal processes can be the bane of businesses facing cost pressures. These are nowhere less significant than in document creation. IDC surveyed 350 companies to discover that the top three most significant causes of inefficiency included:

1. recreating content that already exists
2. searching for content to reuse
3. creating customised varieties of information

While inefficiency is an insidious problem, a more dramatic cost impact is beginning to become apparent: the cost of dissatisfied staff leaving. The impact of churn has been estimated at 150% of a person's salary by both Mercer in Australia and Unisys in NZ. And this may be the tip of the iceberg if you also consider: costs of decreased productivity, lost investment in training and development, loss of revenue for key sales or management executives, administration set up, equipment purchase, recruitment costs, the new employee's induction into the business culture, management downtime in interviewing candidates, legal fees and payout commitments. Once upon a time managers could say - putting together documents is their job, they are paid to do it. The problem is nobody enjoys inefficiency - its not just an economic problem, its a problem for staff satisfaction. If companies do not provide systems and processes that value their people's time, they increasingly risk losing them to a competitive labour market - with very high consequential costs. The benefit cost ratio of document automation will only rise.