It would appear that the paperless office remains something of a myth, according to speakers at the 2010 Paper Recycling Conference & Trade Show, which took place in Chicago, June 13-15.
While more business documents are being created and maintained digitally, paper is still being consumed in business settings. As businesses move to managing their documents digitally, the process can create more secure destruction opportunities for some service providers, according to speakers at the event.
Nick Wildrick of Total Records and Information Management (TRIM), Spartanburg, S.C., said that his former shredding company, Shred First LLC, found that every time a hospital client moved to digital medical records, the volume of paper the company destroyed for them nearly doubled.
While destruction companies experienced a decrease in purge revenue and fewer new clients in 2009 because of complaints about cost, in 2010 companies have seen growth in both of these areas, Wildrick added.
Wildrick was joined on the panel by Jim Johnson, director of document management for Cincinnati-based Cintas, as well as by Bob Johnson, chief executive officer of the National Association for Information Destruction (NAID), Phoenix.
The records and information management industry has changed during the years as a result of the growth in electronic records. Jim Johnson said that in the 1980s, Cintas added storage customers at a growth rate of 10 percent yearly, while business with existing clients grew at a rate of 8 percent per year. Service revenue comprised 40 to 50 percent of the company’s total revenue, and imaging was restricted to microfilm and microfiche, he noted. In the last decade, those numbers began to change slightly. New client growth was 5 percent, with business from existing clients growing by 5 percent, Jim Johnson said. Twenty-five to 35 percent of Cintas’ total was derived from services in the last decade.
Highly active clients are managing their records digitally, Jim Johnson said, adding that health care clients are foremost among those organizations making the transition.
Because digital records provide quicker access, easier distribution and are less likely to be misfiled, they are growing in popularity, Johnson said. Additionally, digital records cost less to store.
Jim Johnson said the production of white bond has increased continually, illustrating that digital records have a long way to go before replacing paper documents. “American businesses create about 90 billion documents per year,” he said. “A document is copied 11 times on average, even if it is created digitally.” For these reasons as well as the growing pressure to recycle and increased awareness of information security, he said, he foresaw the continued generation of paper documents.
“I don’t believe paper will go away in the next 10 years,” Jim Johnson said. “Long-term storage will remain in paper because of the changing [electronic] formats.” He added that paper documents remain “easily and absolutely retrievable.”
Finally, NAID’s Bob Johnson said that all issues related to information management, including legislative and tactical issues, favor electronic records. However, Johnson pointed out that the number of paper records currently in storage amount to more than a decade of business communication paper (BCP) consumption. He also predicted that the volume of records in storage would grow despite decreases in paper consumption. In his view, there was still “quite an opportunity” in document destruction.