The Hidden Costs of Poor Document Search: How Much Time Is Your Business Wasting?
Searching for documents is a secret time thief in the business world. In an environment where time is money, employee productivity is essential to achieve your business goals. Efficient document management ensures that finding documents is a quick and forgettable step in larger projects. However, when documents are hard to find, the time it takes to simply prepare for a task or collaborate with teammates can expand exponentially.
Whether employees spend their time hunting through disorganized file systems or waiting on a slow and inefficient search function, document search can eat away at the productivity of a business day. Today, we’re uncovering the hidden costs of inefficient document search for your business. Discover how much time is being lost and how to reclaim that time with an efficient solution.
The Rise of Digital Documentation
Modern business runs on digital documents. Gone are the days of filing cabinets and boxes of paper. While this is a great thing, it has naturally led to an increased reliance on digital files and documents instead. Digital files should be more accessible, easy to sort, and infinitely easier to copy and share. But first you must find them.
Common document types such as contracts, reports, emails, spreadsheets, graphic designs, and collaborative work product are all critical to managing a modern business. While digital documents are more convenient (and eco-friendly) than paperwork, large digital file systems can lead to challenges in efficiently searching and retrieving the documents you need.
What Is Poor Document Search?
We’ve all experienced the frustration and time loss of poor document search. Hunting through a disorganized file system brings to light how poorly every folder is named and structured. Using ineffective search tools can take minutes to generate results with no guarantee that you chose the right keyword. And using search without sufficient metadata can make it impossible to refine your search results if documents share the same or similar names.
Most importantly, poor document search has a serious impact on productivity and efficiency. You can lose several minutes (if not longer) for every task that requires document retrieval just trying to find the forms, records, or collaboration documents needed for the next step.
1) Time Wasted on Searching for Documents
Employees lose a significant amount of time to searching for documents. The more complex the file system and the more inefficient the search function, the more time is lost.
According to a McKinsey report, employees spend an average of 1.8 hours per day searching for and gathering information. IDC’s Information Worker Survey reports that employees spend over 5 hours a week searching for documents. This represents a significant percentage of daily and weekly time. Poor document search can consume an entire day worth of working time every week depending on the workflow balance between document searching and the speed of each search.
With statistics like these, it should come as no surprise that there are hidden costs associated with slow and inefficient document search features.
2) The Hidden Financial Costs
When employee productivity is impacted on a large scale, there is usually a financial cost to the business. Poor document search can trigger indirect costs such as reduced employee productivity and morale. Waiting on document search results, operational costs may be increased and opportunities missed due to lost time.
There is also a potential risk to your customer satisfaction as the result of delays and errors. If documents are not correctly retrieved or a slow workflow causes deadlines to be pushed back, clients and customers may become dissatisfied with your business.
3) How Poor Document Search Affects Collaboration and Communication
Team collaboration often relies on shared documents. It is critical that your team be able to reference the same files, work on project folders together, and send each other documents that will be constantly referenced during the collaboration process.
Document search issues naturally cause a large disruption to team collaboration efforts. When team members can’t access key files or your system is slowed down by multiple people searching for the same document at once, it becomes impossible for team members to develop a smooth and simultaneous workflow together.
And without the ability to smoothly share and reference documents, you may see profound downstream effects on decision-making and communication throughout the company.
4) The Risk of Compliance and Legal Issues
Clean archives and record-keeping are often essential for a company’s compliance with certain laws and regulations. You should be able to bring up those records at any point during a periodic audit. This means that poor or inefficient document search can even expose a business to legal and compliant risks. For example, if you are required to submit all relevant financial documents to an auditor’s office within a time scope but your file system will not efficiently retrieve all the necessary files, you may find your business under increasingly unpleasant investigation.
A failed compliance audit can result in potential penalties and even reputational damage when important documents go missing.
Improving Document Search: Solutions and Best Practices
The good news is that if your business is bogged down by inefficient search features, there is more than one way to search through your business files. Instead of relying on the search features that come with your computer operating system or business software, you can integrate an effective document management system or software solution like Copernic Desktop & Cloud Search.
When combined with well-organized and detailed document storage, Copernic can help your employees streamline workflows to spend seconds instead of minutes or hours finding exactly the documents they need for every task, project, and collaboration.
Tips for Organizing Documents for Easier Retrieval
- Name documents in a predictable format
- Include detailed metadata for each document and folder
- Place documents in a well-organized and consistent structure of folders
- Minimize documents stored in personal employee accounts in favour of centralized document management
- Use search software that directly integrates with your existing business software and cloud solutions.
The Importance of Metadata
Metadata represents all the little details about a file that make it unique from other files of its type. Metadata includes things like who created and contributed to the file, what collection the file belongs to, the version number, date of approval and other essential details. Including detailed and accurate metadata can make your documents more easily searchable especially if you have many documents with nearly identical names such as a record of invoices or processing forms.
Employee Training on Document Management
Don’t forget that employees need training to make the best use of their tools. Most people aren’t born knowing the best ways to organize and manage digital documents. In fact, none of us are. However, with training and experience, your team can learn how to neatly prepare documents for easy manual and software searches. Provide your team with best practices for document management and document search tools to enhance your search capabilities and improve efficiency.
Reclaim Lost Efficiency and Costs with Efficient Document Search
Is poor document search holding back your company with hidden costs? Slow and inefficient searches can cause lost time and project delays. It can hinder teamwork and discourage communication within your business. Fortunately, there is a solution.
Assess your document search processes and consider upgrading your approach to document management with Copernic Desktop & Cloud Search. Empower your employees to find the documents they need in a flash with access to extensive metadata and content-related search filters. Try Copernic Search for 30-days for free and see how quickly you can find the files you are looking for.