Saving Time: ECM Engages Employees, Eliminates Low-Value Tasks 

Back in our “pain point” article on employees engaged in low-value tasks, we talked a bit about tasks involving transactional processes, moving paper from one person to the next. You’ll remember Whatcom Educational Credit Union, a fast growing financial services company in Whatcom County, Wash, and its growing paper piles – loan applications, membership profiles, and so forth.

With paper physically stored in its main office, whenever a branch employee wanted access to a customer’s file, he or she would have to contact HQ. Someone at the main office would have to find the file, find the right document within the file, and fax the paperwork to the branch access a member’s file – while the member was standing at the teller window or requiring the customer to leave and return.

Consider once more the time it would take to call the main office, finding someone to retrieve the file, time spent retrieving and faxing the file, and reviewing the fax once it came across. How many customers could the teller help if he or she had instant, secure access to the customer’s documentation? What other tasks could he or she pursue in the time they’d get back?

It’s this “overall math” of the low-value task that Paul Davis, executive sponsor at Hyland Software, says surprises most companies considering an enterprise content management (ECM) solution.

“A given task might take only two minutes to complete per day,” says Davis. “But if it’s two minutes per day per transaction and that employee deals with 15 transactions per day, now we’re looking at 30 minutes per day to complete those tasks.” 

That time, multiplied by 260 business days, equals 130 hours. Multiply that by $15 per hour and the “two-minute task” costs almost $2,000 per full-time employee. Multiply that by 10 employees and now you’re looking at a significant chunk of change. 

“I don’t think people often extrapolate out all the way,” says Davis. “They just look at it as two minutes of an admin’s or clerical staff’s time to track something down.”

Eliminate the time spent tracking down documents by implementing a carefully considered, strategically implemented ECM software solution, and the math allows a company to reinvest that $20,000.

Take it up a notch and consider the meaningful time – and money – that could be saved in any traditional healthcare setting: the patient registration process.

“Well known to some is the fundamental dependency healthcare has on the very first step of the process: Registration Scanning, called either paperless registration or Front Office Scanning,” says Davis. “The registration clerk oftentimes has been in his or her role for years – and is so ingrained in how he or she registers patients, perhaps by photocopying the patient’s driver’s license and insurance card – that the clerk is very reluctant to  learn a new system or process.  And yet, if the clerk does something as simple as scanning the wrong side of the driver’s license or insurance card, the negative impact downstream for billing and patient safety can be monumental.”