1. Companies spend $20 in labour to file a document, $120 in labour to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labour to reproduce a lost document.

2. 7.5 percent of all documents get lost; 3 percent of the remainder get misfiled.

3. Professionals spend 5 – 15 percent of their time reading information, but up to 50 percent looking for it.

4. The average document photocopied 19 times.

5. There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone and they are growing at a rate of 22% per year (PricewaterhouseCoopers).

6. Corporate users received an average of 18 megabytes (MB) of e-mail per day in 2007; E-mail is expected to grow to over 28 MB per day by 2011.

7. Users send and receive an average of 133 e-mail messages per day (Radicati Group).

8. A single FAX machine costs $6,200 per year (Captaris); the average time to manually FAX a document is 8 minutes.

9. The average cost to send a package via courier service is between $8 and $15.

10. The cost of office space has increased 19% (Office Space Across the World 2008).

PDF

An advantage of the PDF file format is that anyone can view the document using Adobe Acrobat® Reader, which is free software that can be downloaded from the Internet. This feature makes it very easy to share documents within or outside of an organization because everyone can view the document at no additional cost.

The PDF file format has become the de facto file format for the Internet. This is due to its small file size and the ability to begin viewing the document as soon as the first page downloads (other file formats require you to download the entire file before you can begin viewing the document).

A significant advantage of the PDF file format is that you can add document security at document level. Using Adobe Acrobat® and other third party plug-ins allows you to add file security to prevent unauthorized viewing of the document.

In addition, you cannot alter a PDF document without leaving an electronic footprint. This is a major reason why the U.S. Federal Judiciary has mandated its use for electronic filing of case documents. It also gives an organization the freedom to keep the scanned PDF images on a server to be shared throughout the organization, without the fear of document manipulation.

TIFF

Many document imaging companies that use the TIFF file format use proprietary software to view the TIFF images because the TIFF file format can utilize a variety of compression ratios. This can create a problem for your organization if you were to migrate your imaging system to a different vendor in the future. Your new vendor must have the ability to open and view your archived TIFF documents, which is frequently impossible.

Because of the requirement for proprietary viewing software, it may be difficult to share TIFF files with people outside of your organization. It is important to find out the cost of providing viewing software to outside parties that will be accessing and viewing your documents.

Since a TIFF image can be altered without leaving an electronic footprint, it will require you to save the document to an optical disk or a WORM drive as a read-only file. These devices restrict the ability to alter the document.

You can easily annotate TIFF files where as you can’t with PDF files without 3rd party tools.