As a contributor to the article, Wiessner made the following observations..., "To get a more accurate ROI, community banks should calculate both the hard and soft costs of their current operations and compare those with the costs and savings after investing in an imaging system, vendors advise. "The greatest ROI in deploying an ECM system today is in reducing labor costs by increasing the efficiency of processing and retrieving documents;' offers Alan Wiessner, chief executive of Integra Business Systems Inc., a document imaging provider in Safety Harbor, Fla.
"Banks often discount these soft-cost savings because they fail to recognize they can either eliminate or repurpose employees to reduce costs or to increase productivity, which is essential for growth:' Reducing or eliminating printing costs provides the best ROI in terms of hard dollars savings, Wiessner says. These costs include faxing, copying and distributing paper, estimated at 6 to 14 cents a page, depending on the printer, fax or copy machine used. "But banks don't always know the true amount of these costs because of all the shadow copies employees may be making;' he says. Those are the copies of documents that employees may be making;' he says. Those are the copies of documents that employees in the branches or other areas of the bank make so they don't have to take the time to retrieve documents from the bank's legacy systems in its centralized operations. Sometimes it can take days, but customers needing information off of those documents won't tolerate waiting:' 
By potentially eliminating these shadow costs, the costs of hardware such as multifunction printers or scanners can often be easily justified, Wiessner continues. One example he gives: Desktop scanners can cost less than $1,000 for each branch. ROI should come within 6 to 18 months of implementation of an enterprise content management system, particularly if it's a Web based system.
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