Issue #0821/2 – Paper documents can only be accessed by one individual at any one time, making timely access by others difficult. Sharing by hard copying improves the situation but at the cost of copying and distribution, together with time implications where users are not at the same site. Electronic sharing of documents should promote easy and rapid access without the costs associated with producing and distributing multiple hard copies.
Unless copied – at a cost – the original document is restricted to the document creator, the primary user or the current document owner. And, that individual has to be deprived of the document for a time so that it can be copied and distributed to a wider audience.
Since electrophotography and xerography were invented in the late 1930s, followed by the introduction of commercial photocopiers in the late 1950s, traditional sharing of documents has involved the copying and distribution of the original paper document.
Xerox Model A photocopierCosts of making a hard copy of a document for distribution are anywhere from about half a penny per page (black and white – toner only) to a couple of pence or more, depending on the copying device used. Thus, a 10-page document printed at the lowest rates will cost about 5 pence in toner plus about 4 pence for the paper – let’s round it to 10 pence, or one penny per page. It could easily cost up to 25 pence or more (2.5 pence per page) for copies made on a low-end device with paper purchased through a general retail outlet.
If that document then needs to be distributed by post to another location, the cost of posting (current UK postage rates) would be 52 pence for a large letter postage stamp and about 6 pence for a C4/letter size envelope – total cost of distribution, 58 pence on top of 10 to 25 pence for printing or copying. Strictly speaking, the cost of the labour involved in printing and mailing the document also needs to be added.
PC document creation allowed the original document to be stored electronically but distribution was still usually handled by printing an original and copying that original or, later, by ‘Multiple Original Printing’ (MOPying – a concept from the mid 1990s that attempted to move pages from copiers-based devices to printer-based devices). But, the original then generally needed posting anyway for distribution.
Fax is both a copying and distribution mechanism that has run alongside traditional photocopying and postal methods since the mid 1970s. It took the time element out of long distance document distribution and has taken over from telex as a legally acceptable transmitted document. But, it has certain shortcomings.
These shortcomings are centred around print quality. Although very much better now than even a decade ago, print quality from fax machines most often falls down due to poor maintenance – i.e. the scan mechanism or paper feed rollers are not cleaned regularly, resulting in image dirt, image loss or distortion.
However, poor image quality is also caused by the low resolution, black and white nature of fax (generally 150dpi or 200dpi), which causes text to be blocked and lines to be jagged. Small text, in particular, can be difficult to read. Especially if a faxed document is re-faxed, quality degrades rapidly.
Costs associated with faxing a document for sharing mainly involve the cost of transmission across the telecommunications network. Costing a phone call, a ten page document will typically take about four minutes to transmit. In the UK, the cost of a four-minute local phone call during business hours is about 9 pence in comparison to our large letter cost, as defined above, of 58 pence.
Taking the fax transmission to a national call rate, the cost of a four-minute transmission can rise to about 30 pence but, in today’s climate, a transatlantic transmission between the UK and the US probably would not cost any more - Note: call rates vary according to supplier. However, UK postage costs for a transatlantic letter containing 10 pages would be £2.14 including the envelope.
So, to distribute a document by fax instead of by regular mail can reduce costs considerably and the labour involved in sending a fax is certainly no worse than to prepare a letter for mailing, perhaps better. We are, therefore, talking about distribution cost savings of between 48% and 86% and a time for distribution that is reduced from up to four days (international mail) to virtually instantaneous.
Of course, these are distribution costs only. On top of this needs to be added the cost of printing the document at the receiving end and possibly the printing of the document prior to transmission. However, these merely balance one another out anyway as the paper copies would exist whichever method of distribution is used.
Further cost savings can be achieved by transmitting the fax directly from the PC instead of printing the document prior to faxing. Some users may be able to save the cost of printing the fax on receipt by using PC fax and reading on screen. However, printing of a received fax will probably remain the norm in many business environments for record-keeping purposes for some time to come.
Email then took over as the distribution method of choice and by the time wide area networks (WAN), virtual private networks (VPN) cheap network storage and document sharing facilities arrived and added to that level of electronic accessibility, the opportunity for any authorised individual to see a relevant document, at will, is well on the way to being fully mature.
Perhaps the ultimate scenario is for any authorised user to be able to access any document digitally anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world at any time, work on it and re-save it for colleagues or customers, etc. to review without it ever needing to be committed to hard copy.
Within many document management systems and today’s mobile communications technology, this scenario is a reality. The distribution-specific cost of the document can effectively be reduced to zero.
There are costs involved though. But it is not easy to reduce these costs to a per page or per document level as they involve the infrastructure costs of an IT system that does far more than merely distribute documents.
Visible costs start arising where individuals are using roaming mobile communications that are currently charged at a high rate. However, the instantaneous nature of the system still reaps huge benefits over the time constraints of mailing a document to a travelling worker – where hazards even include the potential for the letter to miss the individual if it is held up in the mail system till the worker has moved on to a new location.
At the bottom line, the benefits to a corporation of installing the document infrastructure are far more wide ranging than just reducing document distribution costs. These infrastructure costs can therefore be minimised in their importance, with distribution time savings perhaps being promoted to being the prime benefit together with savings in distribution costs.
Sharing of documents becomes instantaneous, distribution costs are reduced (sometimes to zero) and hard copy and paper costs are reduced. Electronic sharing can also reduce hard copy costs further (again, sometimes to zero) for those inclined to read on screen rather than committing all documents to hard copy for reading or review. The scale of cost savings achievable are dependent on the precise methods and processes used.
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