Ricoh: Nearly One-Third of Businesses Polled Are Prone to Losing Important Documents

Organizations need to improve the way they manage business critical documentation. If they don't, they're risking


security breaches,


performance,


profitability,


their reputations and


compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which mandates that organizations ensure their business critical documents are not altered, destroyed or misplaced.


Unfortunately, many organizations still haven't updated their processes. In fact, a recent study from Ricoh revealed that nearly one-third of European businesses are prone to losing important documents.

The research, which consisted of 458 telephone surveys within large (1000+ employee) organizations, located in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, The Nordics (Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark), Spain, Switzerland and the U.K., found that:


31 percent of all European businesses are still prone to losing important documents. Organizations in the education sector are most vulnerable, with more than one-third (38 percent) reporting they occasionally lose or misplace business critical information. Only 14 percent in the legal sector admitted the same.


More than one-quarter (29 per cent) of healthcare companies do not have any audit trail process for their business critical documentation.



Only 45 percent of European financial services organizations can confirm that they have the ability to conduct audit trails for all confidential business critical documents. 20 per cent in financial services admitted they have no processes in place at all.


Less than one-quarter (22 percent) of European businesses have a fully automated process to manage business critical processes.


Over half of all companies (52 percent) in the survey said that the biggest impact was significant business process delays. Additional impacts range from damaged reputation to non-payment of invoices, loss of business critical information, compliance breaches and unsatisfied clients.



Most European businesses said that their primary objectives for improving their processes were better security (67 percent), increased knowledge sharing (67 percent) and workforce effectiveness (65 percent).


The 18-page Ricoh Process Efficiency Index is available here.