Ever been curious what paperwork at your company really costs you? I just came across some good stats from analysts and companies like Gartner, Laserfishe and eCopy:

• $30: average cost to file and store one document
• $120: average cost to find a misfiled document
• $220: average cost to reproduce a lost document
• 7.5%: percentage of documents that gets lost
• 90%: how many papers are shuffled when handled

The answer for many small businesses lies in deploying a document management solution to electronically store, share, distribute and collaborate on documents and records. Many companies are adopting the technology to free up office space, improve search and retrieval, ensure regulatory compliance and achieve efficient and secure archiving of business information.

Why It’s on Our Radar

Hard as you may try, there’s no way to avoid paper documents. From mail correspondence and vendor invoices to customer contracts and meeting notes, a lot of your business information lives on paper — or is at least born on paper. Depending on your industry and your day-to-day processes, digitizing these records for easy storage, search and retrieval can produce enormous time savings and help you become a more responsive and flexible organization.

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Few people in the business community need to be sold on the value of email. Everybody’s got an email solution, and for many of you it is the primary method of communication with your vendors, prospects and customers. Yet from our experience many solutions in use today are subpar and don’t reflect the needs of dynamic organizations that employ them.

Why You Should Care

Email is often taken for granted. If you are like most of our customers, you probably selected your first email service years ago when you started the business and didn’t touch it since. Email comes in, email goes out, why mess with it? Many reasons, as it turns out. Chief among them is the ability of a good email and collaboration solution to transform the way you manage business information, work together and communicate with your customers. From sharing your contacts and calendars to unlimited inbox sizes to easy scheduling of meetings and resources, enterprise class email solutions deliver high return on investment through increased productivity and better management of critical data. We aren’t suggesting that every company of every size  should get one, but everybody would do well to perform a cost benefit analysis on this.

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Voice over Internet protocol (or VoIP) allows you to use your broadband Internet connection for your phone service. Replacing traditional phone lines and plans with VoIP services usually results in lower calling rates, better features, more flexibility and lower management costs. Plus if you’re just now approaching the size when you need a phone system, hosted VoIP offerings can save you the initial expense of buying and deploying one.

Why It’s on Our Radar

As far as phone communications go, today’s VoIP services offer great call quality at low monthly or per-minute rates. Yet this isn’t the only reason small businesses are embracing the concept. A good VoIP solution can make you more productive, make you appear a larger company than you are and cut your overhead expenses. Many business VoIP vendors have evolved past providing cheap, feature-rich phone lines to providing “unified communications” services that converge all of your business communications — phone calls, faxes, voicemail, email — into a single inbox and a single phone number for you. A customer calling your office line when you’re not there will send your VoIP system looking for you at other numbers you’ve provided. A voicemail you receive while in meeting will appear in your email inbox for easy follow-up. Incoming faxes are automatically sorted and filed as PDF documents. Geek value of this aside, it’s easy to see how VoIP can make your customers happier and your office more productive.

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Small and medium businesses are rapidly adopting mobile office solutions to stretch the boundaries of the physical office, increase responsiveness and improve productivity of their staffs. By turning downtime into fully productive time in places like cabs, trains, client sites and airports, you can save many hours a week and do with them as you please.

Why It’s on Our Radar

Two reasons: mature technology and high ROI. Recent years have brought big improvements in the quality of wireless networks, mobile devices and software, making mobile office offerings extremely user-friendly and reliable. Meanwhile, prices are coming down across a broad range of solutions, allowing companies to add a lot of capacity for a relatively small investment. Consider that an average Blackberry user gains 60 minutes of productive time per day simply by checking and responding to email during downtime in elevators, waiting areas and meeting rooms. Mobile broadband and mobile application solutions can introduce similar time savings, while also enhancing responsiveness and streamlining operations across your business.

Solution Types

Let’s review three categories of mobile solutions that can help you save time and simplify many daily processes:

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