What it costs, on your numbers
Every field below is editable and every result recalculates as you type. We have put our starting guesses in, but they are guesses. The useful version of this page is the one where you have replaced them — including the version where you replace them and the answer comes out too small to bother with.
Your fleet and volume
Nothing here is measured. Replace every number with yours.
Speeds
Device speed comes off the spec sheet. OCR throughput is the one worth measuring.
Architecture
Engines today versus workers you could run when it is busy.
People and money
The two inputs most likely to be argued about in a boardroom.
Across the fleet that is — of device availability returned per year, or about — handed back to every machine, every day — without buying a machine.
The busiest hour, cleared with the engines you have versus workers you could add.
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This is the only figure here we would put in front of a finance person, and even then with the caveat that recovered minutes are only worth money if they get spent on something useful. Treat it as the ceiling, not the forecast.
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What this model does not count
Some of these would make the case stronger and some would make it weaker. They are left out because we cannot size them honestly yet, and a model with an invented number in it is worth less than a model with a hole in it.
- Re-scans caused by somebody assuming the job failed. Real, and impossible to size without asking.
- The knock-on cost of a document arriving after the person who needed it went home.
- Time spent manually renaming, splitting and filing what arrives. Genuinely large, but it belongs to the second conversation.
- Capital and licence cost of the current capture server, which would partly offset any new spend.
- The cost of the proposed platform itself. Until the proof of concept runs, any figure would be invented.
- Staff goodwill, which is not a number but is the reason this conversation started.
Share of OCR time that holds the device.
Set it to zero and effects one and three collapse to nothing — the device was never held, and the only problem left is time-to-document. Set it to one hundred and it is the largest number on the page. We have assumed the worst case because that is what was described, but assumption is the wrong word to have at the centre of a business case.
One person, one stopwatch, one big job. It is the cheapest fact on this site to acquire and the most expensive one to be wrong about.
How we would prove it →