It is often heartbreaking to realize that not many organizations understand the strategic importance of the Records management function. Records management is more than simply collecting and storing records. Instead of looking at only one outcome – which often is getting required documents on time, we need to carefully observe our interaction with records at each and every step in the process. You will be surprised to read about how simple things we take for granted in everyday work life accumulate into huge aspects – in the form of financial losses, degraded employee morale, compromised information security etc. In this blog post we try to bring light to some aspects that are usually not noticed or known, citing findings from authentic research on Records Management. 1) Photocopy It! The Mantra that guzzles the office budget “A document is photocopied almost 19 times, on average.” Is this negligent? Maybe! But only to limited thinking of treating ourselves as an Employee. Think it from a large business perspective. When hundreds and thousands of records of a records-intensive business are photocopied for not-so-justifying reasons in a careless manner – it certainly dents the overall administrative budget. Upon doing this, imagine the added costs and confusions attached towards storing those duplicated documents either in-house or at a records storage facility. 2) It’s better to Outsource than Self-Managing It When most businesses think about records management – they only think it from a cost-saving or effort-saving perspective. Never from a strategic perspective. Let’s look at some of the aspects here. Often businesses come into the conclusion of self-managing records because they have large infrastructure that can accommodate any volume of physical records storage. The same way, they assume that they have the required man-power who can manage storing and retrieval of files. In the process of doing so, they end-up investing in file cabinets, storage boxes etc. Other aspects like electricity, pest-control, lighting, space & labor costs go unnoticed. Businesses fail to understand how better that infrastructure and manpower can be utilized if not allocated for Records storage. 3) Losing Track of the Big Picture An average of INR 8400 worth of time is spent each day looking for documents” Simply storing files can only create ruckus and chaos in a workplace. Everyone involved will have their own understanding of records. That is just costly and highly ineffective. Not everyone at your organization will search for files. It would be mostly strategic employees who might have to refer to records before taking informed decisions. Imagine the amount of time they will be spending with office help resources available to locate the document, put it back and forth. Just imagine the size of your business. Can you afford to waste a nominal average estimate of INR 8400 each day for 260 working days a year – That is a whopping INR 21,84,000 loss per annum. 4) Getting used to Human Errors “About 7.5% of all records get lost” This is very bad! More than anything when we are accustomed to human errors, a business cannot prosper. If there is a work culture that is used to Misplacing, losing and recreating paper records it is an alarming thing. The sad part is, it will take a significant amount of money, effort and time to course-correct that attitude. 5) Losing Money without even realizing “Cost for records storage and records maintenance are Not the same” Printing, copying, sorting and filing documents cost a lot of money. It is estimated to cost about INR 17,50,000 to fill a four-drawer filing cabinet. In addition, it costs an additional INR 1,47,000 per year to maintain physical records safe and secure. Are we taking these into account when we calculate the return on investment in a business? We take things for granted. We assume everything with respect to our business is just fine. If you care to eliminate these unknown and unnoticed losses to your business, begin your process to implement a systematic records management. Consult KAYMAN Records Management - a trusted records management company in Chennai with a lot of proven case studies in implementing holistic information management and having a state-of-the-art records storage facility.