ROI From Records Management

Records Management is often a necessary evil that organizations have to contend with.  Factors outside the organization such as government regulations often dictate that records policies are implemented and followed.  Every department is forced into the system whether they want to or not.  From a financial perspective, Records Management is just more overhead in both time and money, but what would happen if we re-imagine Records Management in terms of both ROI and benefit to the organization?  In this article, I'm going to give you four areas where you may be able to leverage Records Management to increase your ROI.  

Legal Expenses
Every organization has the potential to deal with litigation.  Whether litigation is part of everyday life or a once a year or once every five years event, Records Management is critical to reducing litigation expenses in several ways and is often the only place where a Records Management implementation is used to justify a return to the organization.

1. Discovery - The cost of Discovery, or finding documentation required by the litigation, is dramatically reduced when you have implemented a consistent records management policy using modern records management techniques with a solution like AutoRecords with M-Files.  Finding documentation related to a topic across the organization is a simple search.
2. Analysis - Now that you've discovered all of the content, you or a very expensive attorney have to group it, analyze it, and review it.  Records Management ensures you have only the documents that are necessary.  It's the difference in reviewing 100 documents or 10,000.  It will cost dramatically less to analyze 100 invoices if that's all you have on your system due to your records management policy.
3. Consistency - For the purposes of litigation having a consistent Records Management policy that is enforced across the organization is much easier to defend should the need arise.  You don't have to explain why your organization got rid of some documents but kept other similar documents of interest.  Consistent application of a records management policy helps litigation proceed smoothly and makes the organization appear much more professional.

While there can be some significant time and money saved in Legal Expenses contributing to tremendous ROI, these types of expenses are very hard to predict unless your organization is dealing with litigation continuously.  

Process Mining / Process Improvement
Another opportunity for ROI to the organization is in the area of Process Mining / Process Improvement.  Process Mining is the newer more technical big brother of Process Improvement.  Both seek to find ways to look at an organizations processes and find opportunities for improvement.  I've made the case previously that Records Managers are uniquely suited to understand the transactions that occur in an organization and the corresponding records that are produced from those transactions.  By looking at each "record" as an output of a transaction that is part of a process, it starts to become clear how someone who is a Records Manager is tightly connected to everything that happens in an organization.

When an organization is working to implement Process Mining or has a Process Improvement initiative, the Records Manager can be instrumental in delivering immediate ROI with a Records Management system.  Using a system like AutoRecords with M-Files, outputs from each transaction can be automated for classification, storage and ultimately disposition.  This eliminates the manual processes that are often associated with moving files around from folder to folder to keep track of documents and simplifies searching and retrieval when dealing with things like warranty claims and defects.  Most importantly, the ability to quickly revise and implement new retention policies can clean up cumbersome processes and organize otherwise chaotic information.  

As with Litigation, Process Mining / Process Improvement is a difficult ROI to predict.  The amount of ROI each improvement brings varies, but incorporating records management into any process improvement will certainly increase the ROI of each of those improvements.

Storage Costs
Even in the modern world of big data, there are costs for storing data.  One obvious place that Records Management will deliver ongoing financial return for the organization is by limiting the storage cost for an organization.  With AutoRecords in M-Files, the logging and reporting capabilities make it easy to detail precisely how much is being saved in storage costs over a period of time.

Savings from these ongoing storage costs are on-going and can be used to help bolster the importance of records management policies across the entire organization.  For example, it's very common for certain departments in an organization to comply with regulatory requirements and implement a retention policy while other departments that aren't subject to those requirements tend to keep everything forever.  Outdated policies from 20 years ago still live on in the depths of the network share along with countless Redundant, Obsolete & Trivial (ROT) documents.  

Transactional Costs
This is perhaps the biggest opportunity for ROI and the most overlooked opportunity by most Records Managers.  Every organization has a series of transactions that are used to do whatever it is the organization does.  Documents and records are part of many of those transactions.  Each transaction and each document carries a cost to the organization.  A cost to produce, a cost to store, a cost to access when needed, a cost to maintain, and a cost to remove when no longer needed.  It's important for a Records Manager to be aware of these costs.  For example, what is the cost to access "a record?"  Let's use a small Credit Union as an example.  A "record" might be a copy of a mortgage document or a check.  How does the Credit Union member get a copy of a mortgage document they signed 12 years ago?  Accessing the document will have a cost for the Credit Union.  That is also true of a manufacturing company who needs to supply a copy of a purchase order or invoice to a supplier.  That is also true of a government entity providing documentation to individuals. 

In each case the document must be part of the records management system, but must also be accessible outside the organization.  The Records Manager needs to be aware of each type of document, its lifecycle and how it is used, so ease of access  and maintenance can become a strategic advantage and a value to the organization.  Thinking beyond traditional retention policies, a Records Manager using M-Files and AutoRecords has the flexibility to deliver documents and records in any number of secure and flexible ways.

Summary
The modern records manager has a tremendous opportunity to influence the organization and bring real ROI.  Traditionally, Records Management would be thought of as a way to curb legal expenses and reduce storage costs.  However, as organizations get more sophisticated with Process Mining and Process Improvement, there are opportunities for Records Managers to play a significant role in reducing costs for an organization.  Additionally, with modern flexible records management systems like M-Files with AutoRecords, what used to be a black box records management system with clunky proprietary access methods can now be a robust, flexible, secure and tightly integrated solution which provides reduced transactional costs across the organization.

Using these four broad categories, every organization can benefit from some fairly quick return on investment by implementing Records Management.  Even organizations that aren't compelled to use Records Management due to regulatory and compliance issue should be exploring the ROI that Records Management can provide.