News release

Study finds broken document processes widespread
Ricoh's international Document Process Imperative discovers business ‘blind spot’
July 31, 2012

Ineffective document-based processes directly triggered serious incidents at three out of four organizations in the past five years, according to a new internally researched IDC white paper commissioned by Ricoh Company, Japan.

The white paper is the first product of Ricoh’s new Document Process Imperative initiative, and involved more than 1,500 respondents from companies in eight countries giving frank feedback on issues that have affected their business.

Document process failures reportedly caused severe consequences: 36 per cent of responding companies failed to meet compliance requirements, 30 per cent lost key employees, and 25 per cent lost major customers. Other consequences include major IT security breaches, getting pulled into a major audit, suffering a PR crisis, and being sued.

Ricoh Consulting Services General Manager Cameron Mount says the study is in line with the company’s observations in New Zealand, where clients have suffered serious setbacks from poor document processes.

“Ineffective document processes, particularly in areas such as accounts payable, contribute to costly inefficiencies in many businesses, and as the study has shown, these can have severe consequences. With the right assistance from a document solutions consultant, businesses can be totally transformed, and problems largely eliminated.”

The IDC study found some good news: addressing failures proactively can head off substantial financial harm. IDC estimates that the overall cost of process failure (in terms of staff time and executive oversight for activities such as required rework and process reviews, as well as opportunity costs associated with lost customers) is at least 10 times the direct out-of-pocket costs (such as paying financial settlements).

Cameron Mount says IDC found many businesses don’t appreciate the degree to which document-driven business processes affect their organization’s risk profile. There is a high risk of breakdowns in these processes causing severely negative business outcomes.

“IDC’s report title It's Worse Than You Think: Poor Document Processes Lead to Significant Business Risk is totally apt,” says Cameron Mount. “Unfortunately, the Christchurch earthquakes highlighted the problems which can come from poor document processes, such as old-style document storage. The loss of documents such as deeds and other crucial contracts, which can be efficiently scanned, stored and retrieved electronically, was just one example.”

The Ricoh Document Process Imperative is an ongoing initiative to help businesses understand the risks, opportunities and best practices around the documents that drive their critical business processes.

Respondents for the IDC survey were randomly recruited and screened from international panels and came from the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Australia, China and Japan.

Document-driven business processes were defined as processes that are governed and controlled by information captured in documents, whether paper or electronic.

Document process inefficiencies and ineffectiveness afflict all industries, geographies and company sizes, according to IDC. Serious business and compliance incidents have occurred at roughly equal rates in organizations in North America, Europe, and Asia, the data showed, with the highest rates (79 per cent) in Asia.

Proposals for improving document processes sometimes fail because they don’t make it onto the agenda of top-level executives, the research found. Cameron Mount says; “That’s an important threshold because document processes span multiple teams, departments and organizations. Many people below senior manager level don’t have the scope of responsibility to architect and execute the broad-based changes required. “

“Through Ricoh’s consulting division, we work to understand how information flows through an organization and how business processes, especially people-driven ones, affect that flow,”

“Improved processes can not only help drive efficiency and productivity, but can be engineered to help address risk factors at every stage.”