Billions for office equipment

Press, 28 June 1983, Page 33

Billions for office equipment

By

WARWICK ORR,

1.8. M. New Zealand, Ltd. One United States research organisation, in reporting the conclusions of its evaluations of investment into office systems, claims that in the United States alone, businesses will invest SUS4O billion in office systems equipment during the year 1990. This would suggest that New Zealand businesses will be spending some hundreds of millions of dollars during that year on office systems. Why should businesses invest such sums? The answer lies in the lack of investment in equipment to support the large investment in the salaries of managers and professionals. If you examine a typical company, 30 per cent of its office employees have a clerical function, 10 per cent have a secretarial-typ-ist function and 60 per cent balance are the managers and non-managers (or professionals as they are called). If you examine then the salary, wage and overheads cost of these people, then the percentages change. Twenty-two per cent of the cost relates to the clerical function, six per cent to the secretarial-typist function and a massive 72 per cent is spent on the managers and

professionals. However, when you consider the dollars spent on equipment to support these people, the investment is extremely unbalanced. Seventy per cent has been spent on equipment to support the clerical function. The balance of 30 per cent of the investment dollars has been spent on the secretaries, managers and professionals, who represent 78 per cent of the cost. We are seeing word processors being purchased for the secretaries but what do the managers and professionals receive? — calculators. Yet upon whom does the business depend for its revenue-obtaining activities and its decision-making process? — the managers and professionals. Studies have shown that of the order of only 10 to 15 per cent of the total time spent by the office personnel in a typical company is spent on analysis and deci-sion-making. What would be the effect of doubling this activity? — more products and services might be brought to the market. The objective of office systems is to increase the productivity of all office staff, allowing the time so saved to be spent innovatively.