Hi Jane:
You may be interested in actually fully calculating the cost of this out for
yourself (I was!)
Let's assume a document of 1,000 pages (it makes the maths easier) and a
total of 200 changes across 100 pages. Let's assume there are 100 copies of
the manual in use across the company. Let's assume everyone involved has an
"On-cost" (including premises, facilities, insurances, taxes, supplies and
entitlements as well as salary) to the company of $50.00 an hour. For the
level of staff that will be involved, most of them cost twice that. Let's
assume your lazer printer runs for 3 cents an impression (six cents per
sheet).
Let's also assume that you, as the Documentation Controller, bear management
accountability for ensuring that out-dated information is not in use
anywhere within the company (a legal requirement for various legislation,
and a requirement to keep the various liability insurances current for a
large company).
You print 100 copies of each of 100 changed pages. It takes you two hours
to run the print job and collate the results into 100 packages: $100.00
labour plus $6.00 printing.
To keep this simple, we will assume that addressing and posting the packages
costs the same for the replacement pages as it does for the whole manual, so
we can discount it.
You create a spreadsheet to track the recipients of all the copies. You
need two columns per update: "Material sent" and "Old pages checked".
You send the packages to each recipient, with instructions to add the
changed pages, remove the old pages, and return those to you. You are
legally required to get the old pages back, so you can prove the update has
been applied, otherwise you are exposed to the risk that employees simply
won't update their manuals. Which means if something does go wrong, the
insurance company won't pay. You get to spend the rest of your career
talking to expensive lawyers...
Each of the recipients spends an hour inserting the changed pages and
sending the old ones back to you. That's $5,000.00 worth of time.
Getting each package of pages back, checking that they are all present,
chasing up the people who have done it wrong, getting the rest of the
changed pages back, and ticking off the spreadsheet will take 1 hour per
copy (the 50 per cent who do it right will cost you 15 minutes each, the 50
per cent who do it wrong will cost you two hours each including playing
telephone tag to encourage them to do it right...) . That's $5,000.00 worth
of time.
The Sarbanes Oxeley Act will require someone to inspect a random sample of
ten per cent of the changed manuals once a year to ensure that the correct
pages were inserted in the correct places. You will use 10 working days per
year visiting people to check their manuals, making the travel arrangements,
and correcting any deficiencies and updating your records. That's $4,000.00
in time plus say $300.00 in taxis and air fares.
So if you update that manual once a year, your company will spend $14,406.00
updating that one title.
If you simply print 100 x 1000 pages and send each person a new manual, you
spend 100 x $30.00 = $3,000.00. You do not need any tracking and
administration, and no verification. Typically, you would run a large job
like that on a commercial laser printer which will run for 1.5 cents a sheet
including paper cost. And typically, an employee costs a company closer to
$90.00 an hour than $50.00. So the costs and savings are potentially twice
as high as I have shown here.
There is another layer of difficult to quantify intangibles I have not taken
into account. Things such as "The bigger the manual, the less willing
people are to tackle updating it, and the longer they put it off." "The
higher the page count, the higher the possibility of getting updates in the
wrong place." "The higher the page count, the greater impact a page in the
wrong place will have on information retrieval speed under pressure." "The
higher the page count and the further apart the copies are, the greater the
savings in time and transport from putting the file on the intranet and
letting everyone print their own."
But if you followed the link I put in the article, you will discover that
all-up, Exxon spent more than $1,000,000,000.00 in costs, charges, fines,
repairs and compensation when the control-room operator of their gas plant
was unable to safely shut their plant down because his manual did not
contain the correct replacement pages. That's not exactly "financially
friendly". And the environmental impact of blowing up a large petrochemical
plant is not trivial either
I'm not making this up. And I am not trying to have a go at you. I
actually analyzed this subject fully and completely when I was employed as a
Documentation Manager, and I realised that it would be MY delicate behind
that found itself sitting in jail if I got this wrong
You can imagine
that I opted for "Full reprint" and "Folio by volume" (continuous page
numbers...) after just a preliminary survey of the real costs involved.
Hope this helps
--
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http://www.word.mvps.org/
Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:
[email protected]