WEYMOUTH, Mass.--Sept. 28, 2005-- A recent InfoTrends/CAP Ventures Study indicated that organizations believed they were spending an average of 3% of their revenues on copying, printing, and fax-related costs. In this case, the reality is twice the perception. Our research and analysis, combined with findings from ALL Associates Group, reveals that overall document expenditures (including hardware, supplies, and "people" costs) in fact average 6% of annual revenues. This cost can vary widely by type of industry, with data showing the average in Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals at 8.5%, while the less paper-intensive Transportation industry averages 2.37%. This variation continues as one "peels the onion" in terms of size of establishment, geography, employee mix, etc. Typically, only 10% of office document burdened costs relate to equipment, supplies, and service expenses. For every $1 spent on the hard output costs, $9 is spent on other burdened costs including IT support and infrastructure, procurement and facility costs, end-user interaction time, and document management expense. These fragmented costs are in budgets and processes across the organization. Only about 10% of the real document costs are ever exposed by an assessment, which means that 90% of the actual costs are being overlooked. Perceived "Total Cost of Ownership" or TCO (hard costs) is in reality not even close to the actual total. "Understanding your organization's overall enterprise document costs is a challenge, but without this information you can't assess the magnitude of the savings opportunity and develop a future document strategy," commented Charles A. Pesko, Managing Director at InfoTrends/CAP Ventures. "Through our assessments and EDAM predictive models, we continue to help companies identify the true costs, increase optimization, decrease costs, and create competitive advantages while showing them how they compare to others within their industry." While the majority of the respondents considered tracking, monitoring, and managing document output to be an important issue, less than half claimed to have some sort of document tracking solution. Additionally, less than half are familiar with document assessment services. With this general confusion when it comes to estimating true document output costs, interest in assessment services is on the rise. To request more information on InfoTrends/CAP Ventures' enterprise document assessment services and modeling or a free copy of our white paper entitled "Assessing & Benchmarking Document Costs: Developing a Future Document Strategy," please contact Scott Phinney at (781) 616-2100 or via e-mail at [email protected].