What are the costs of running a disorganized business?

...some statistics...

Record-keeping constitutes over 90% of the activity within offices.

45 new sheets of paper are generated each day by every U.S. office worker.

More than 80% of the cost to maintain paper records is in the personnel-time required to retrieve and replace documents in the filing system.

The personnel cost to handle records averages over 20 times the cost of the records themselves.

280 hours (7 weeks) per year are lost by workers seeking clarification due to poor communication.

Paperwork has been voted the biggest burden for small businesses. 80% of papers that are filed are never referenced again.

The Wall Street Journal (March, 1997) reports the average U.S. executive wastes 6 weeks per year searching for misplaced information from messy desks and files. This equals 5 hours per week or one hour per day. At $60,000/year in salaries, that is nearly $8,000/year in wasted time on the job.

Another theory is that 10% of a manager's salary is lost to disorder in the office.

Per management engineers, misfiled documents cost between $61-122 to be retrieved. The cost is calculated by the value of the person looking for the file, the person interrupted to find the file, the space the file occupies, and the cost to recreate the file if it cannot be retrieved.

In the top 10 list of management wasters for the past 20 years is managing paper. Locating misfiled electronic data on the computer will soon join this list.

Each year, an average 100 lbs. of waste is generated by an individual office worker.

The average employee at a desk uses between 150-250 lbs. of paper every year.

According to US News and World Report, the average American spends one year of their life looking for lost or misplaced items at home and in the office.

According to The American Demographic Society, Americans waste more than 9 million hours each day looking for lost and misplaced articles.

And the good news: For every hour of planning, 3-4 hours are saved from redundancy, waiting for information, not being prepared and poorly managed tasks...

The Math of Corporate disorganization:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (from a study in the 80s, so the numbers would be much higher now:

Typical Managerial hourly wage: $27.43

Typical Secretarial hourly wage: $11.52

Call it $15, then add benefits, tax, etc,(another 50%) $22.50

1 hour wasted a day, 240 workdays in the year, is $5400 per person in the company

Now imagine a 20 person disorganized company that sells a product in which they consistently make a profit of 10%. To make up for a loss of $108,000 (20 x 5400) they would have to sell $1.08 million of their product to make up for this loss.