While many of us assume the often-quoted "time is money" capitalist mantra is the product of a Donald Trump or a Richard Branson, it was actually coined by a man who is remembered almost 220 years after his death and whose ideas and inventions will continue to shape the world long after Trump Towers has turned to dust and Virgin has reverted to its original meaning.
Benjamin Franklin was an author, political theorist, politician, printer, scientist, inventor, civic activist, and diplomat. With so many varied interests, it's no wonder he understood that time equals money.
So, if time is money and companies are looking to maximise revenue, then why don't they start with the most effective way of boosting earnings without much effort? Why look to diversify, expand, or explore before you've examined practical methods of squeezing more rands from the hours in the day?
Enterprise content management (ECM) tools in general and imaging technologies in particular are, in my experience, highly effective in clawing back money lost due to unproductive and cumbersome systems in place in the organisation.
The ECM industry takes the headache out of mountains of paper by turning them into useful information that integrates seamlessly into company processes. The most obvious benefit of using scanning and imaging technologies to convert paper records to electronic records is when it comes to managing debtors. Nowhere is time more important to earning money than in the collection of cash owed by customers.
Let's look at the specific example of proof-of-deliveries (PODs), an area where scanning and imaging comes into its own. Say a major dairy delivers milk to an even bigger national retailer and requires the retailer to sign for every delivery, indicating that the delivery has been received and everything is in order. On one occasion, the retailer does a stock check and thereafter believes that one milk delivery did not arrive. The retailer now refuses to pay its entire national account with the dairy until the latter can produce the proof of delivery proving the milk was in fact delivered and accepted by the retailer.
Now, if the retailer's business is worth a not unreasonable figure of R100 million to the dairy, every day that the retailer doesn't pay the outstanding account because the dairy can't find the paper record in the thousands of PODs stashed in boxes at its head office, the dairy loses the interest it would have earned on R100 million. If we assume the dairy could've earned an annual interest rate of 8% on a money market account, then each day it's losing almost R22 000. Around R22 000 a day possibly doesn't sound like too much of a train smash when the customer's account is worth R100 million per month. But when one considers this is money down the drain that will never buy a single useful thing for the company, it's totally unforgivable that R22 000 is being lost every day simply because easily-retrievable electronic PODs do not exist.
We have only looked above at the cost-savings from interest secured when records are easily locatable, but the primary reason to investigate ECM solutions remains the hugely positive effect the technology has on productivity within the enterprise.
A case in point is HealthBridge. After introducing a processing bureau to cut the cost of processing paper-based claims, the medical switch estimates it could save R237 million per annum. While 80% of medical claims processing takes place electronically, many doctors and health providers are still pushing paper with associated expense and accuracy issues. Now, the sophisticated character recognition software and digital archiving capabilities employed in the DAS processing bureau should dramatically cut the cost of processing paper-based claims.
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