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Does EAM Document Handling Save Time and Money?

With almost every asset purchase comes a slew of documents such as contracts, war-ranties or service guides. On top of this

there may be blueprints, diagrams, schematics or other documents in addition to the vendor informa-tion that needs to be kept organized. Do you know where your asset documentation is at and how it much it costs your facility to manage the paper flow? Let us paint a picture here for you.

In an effort to keep this post as concise as possible the following sections/questions are designed to help you understand the costs of manual document management:

How Are Asset Documents Handled At Your Facility?

1. How many documents are associated with each asset? For example: vendor contact in-formation, warranty, service contract etc…

2. How many assets share documents? For example: a warranty may cover several assets purchased at the same time like HVAC

fans.3. How are documents accessed, how often

and by whom?4. How many vendors do you have per type of

asset (such as elevators, chillers, boilers or HVAC)? Very important to know if you have multiple facilities or duplicate assets.

5. Do individual facilities keep their own docu-ments or are they stored at the home office or central location?

6. Who in your organization knows what documents you have and how to retrieve them?

7. How long does it take to retrieve a docu-ment?

8. When an asset document request is made, does the person requesting the document get a copy or an original?

9. How many copies of asset documents do you make each year?

10. How many documents can’t be found?

Asset Management Requires Accessible Documents

Whether you are in hotel facilities management or plant management you have assets of different ages. Some assets are under warranty, some have service agreements and others have been around so long the rust is the only thing holding it together (no manager jokes here – lol). In addition, a multi-property facility such as a hotel might have multiple vendors performing the same function. An example of this is a different elevator service company for each property.

Paper, paper everywhere and nowhere can the right document be found. Part of good asset management

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Does EAM Document Handling Save Time and Money?

is being able to find the right information at the right time. With this in mind, there might be an opportu-nity for document and vendor improvement if your facility (multiple or individual facility):

• Is unable to quickly determine the quality of vendors. This includes promptness, pricing, quality of work, terms of service and so on.

• Cannot identify how many vendors you use. How many different elevator service com-panies do you use?

• Cannot compare contracts across similar vendors to consolidate vendors and ser-vices. For example: Can elevator contracts be consolidated to one or two vendors de-pending on city, region or country?

• The only copy of the service agreement is covered with coffee stains in a file cabinet and the boss is out of town when the eleva-tor breaks down.

• The only time you think about the contract is when you are stuck in an elevator.

How do Your Facilities Stack Up?

If you are like most facilities management, you pro-bably don’t have an answer to many of the preceding questions. Do not worry, you are not alone. The following are some interesting statistics regarding document handling:

Interesting Paper flow Statistics

• 90% of corporate memory exists on paper.• Of all the pages that get handled each day in

the average office, 90% are merely shuffled.• The average document gets copied 19 times.• Companies spend $20 in labor to file a

document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document.

• 7.5% of all documents get lost, 3% of the remainder get misfiled.

• Professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% looking for it.

• There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone – growing at a rate of 22% per year.

Source: Coopers & Lybrand

• A typical employee spends 30% – 40% of his time looking for information locked in e-mail, documents, shared hard disks and filing cabinets.

• The average document is copied 9 to 11 times.

• When an employee leaves a company 70% of his knowledge walks out the door with him.

• Each four-drawer file cabinet holds an ave-rage of 10,000 to 12,000 documents, takes up to 9 square feet of floor space, and costs $1,500 per year.

• Every 12 filing cabinets require an additio-nal employee to maintain.

• 18 minutes is the average search time for a document.

• Each lost document costs $350 to $700.• More than 70% of today’s businesses would

fail within 3 weeks if they suffered a catas-trophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or flood.

• 67% of data loss is directly related to user blunders, making them 30 times more me-nacing than viruses and the leading cause of data loss.

• At any given time, between 3 and 5 percent of an organization’s files are lost or mis-placed.

• U.S. managers spend an average of 4 weeks a year searching for or waiting on misfiled, mislabeled, untracked, or ‘lost’ papers.

• Large organizations lose a document every 12 seconds.

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Does EAM Document Handling Save Time and Money?

Source: AIIM, Forrester, Star Securities, US Department of Labor

How much money do you figure is going out the door due to poor document management?

It is easy to understand how paper can create bott-lenecks, lost time, wasted administrative labor and drain the patience from reasonable people. The good news is there is an easier way to handle documents specifically associated with asset management. The solution is Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) software. EAM software works by creating an asset database that can:

• Collect asset detail such as location, physical description, vendor information, barcode, age, condition and virtually any other infor-mation a facility wishes to track.

• Allows document uploads. Any document file (PDF, WORD, XLS, JPG etc.) can be loa-ded and assigned to an asset or multiple assets.

• Allows the setting of access rights for who can view the document.

• Allows you to pull up documents using a variety of search criteria. For example: all elevator contracts or all building warran-ties.

• Enable the setting of customizable summary records with facility defined fields of im-portance. In other words a summary record will exist showing key facts without opening the entire document.

• Full document views are available on any PC with access rights. No more lost docu-ments, copying or filing issues.

• Increase centralization of vendor mana-gement and corporate wide asset/vendor decisions

Document handling with an EAM is not only a ti-mesaver for management but can be a huge costs

savings according to the paper flow statistics above. EAM document handling is just one way an EAM system can directly impact the bottom line of an organization.

Share with us how your facility handles documents and what problems you face. If you liked this article you may also enjoy reading:

EAM, EAM Documents, facilities management

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