Chasing after a paper-free business is a lot like trying to find the end of a rainbow.
Why? Because it doesn’t exist.
Paper will always find its way into an organization. Vendors will send contracts. Customers will send purchase orders. Potential employees will bring resumes.
“Going paperless”—eliminating paper usage and managing documents in the cloud or web-based filing systems—sounds hip, smart, and eco-friendly. However, the reality is that paper still permeates the modern office. And businesses have been slow to start the transition.
The good news is that, although “going paperless” is an urban myth, paperless processes within your company are a reality. Many human resources (HR) departments have digitized their travel and expense reporting. AP departments have made payroll paperless. Businesses dealing with shipping orders to customers have moved to paperless document management—and all of them are reaping the benefits.
Consider a few statistics:
- It takes about 18 minutes on average to search for a document
- A typical employee spends 30-40% of their time hunting for information within email, documents, filing cabinets, etc.
- A four-drawer file cabinet holds an average of 10,000 documents and costs $1,500 per year
- More than 70% of today’s businesses would fail within 3 weeks if they suffered a catastrophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or flood
And those are just a few of the reasons to go paperless.
What’s the Big Deal About Going Paperless?
Paper was the way of life in business for a long time. But there are plenty of reasons to re-think paper as the foundation of your business processes.
1. Paper Kills Productivity
When talented employees have to spend half their day shifting papers from person to person and pile to pile, it pulls them away from what they were hired to do.
Folks in accounts payable (AP) spend a large portion of their time on mundane paperwork, redundant data entry, or finding documents instead of doing their actual jobs.
2. Paper Slows Down Processes
Paper-based processes can be incredibly inefficient. A paper document can sit on someone’s desk for a week without being routed to the next person, slowing the whole process down.
Even if you have a standard routing process for approvals, it becomes hard to manage and enforce without some kind of digital automation.
3. Paper is Expensive
Dealing with paper—from finding and filing to delivering documents— is costly.
Hunting down important documents in email or files consume precious time. And maintaining storage for paper documents becomes expensive in the long run.
Printing and sending paper documents racks up costs as well, as businesses must continually pay for printing, toner, ink, and postage.
In addition, the physical nature of paper could present potentially disastrous security-related costs.
Why is Paperless Better?
There’s an obvious ROI to paperless processes.
Storing and managing forms and documents in the cloud or an on-premises document management system means less money spent on paper and storage costs. Plus, there's greater employee ROI from time saved.
With digital document management, you can be more productive. And you'll manage and find important information faster.
Plus, paperless processes often integrate with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) and line of business (LOB) to support overall usability.
3 Steps to Take Paper Out of Your Processes
Take a look at your current business processes. And run them through the following three steps.
You'll be able to see if a process will benefit from going totally or partially paperless with a digital document management solution.
1. Evaluate Your Current Process
Are your current processes working well? Do they hit any barriers? Are they taking too long?
If there are bottlenecks, identify the problem area. Then hone in on what exactly needs to be optimized.
2. Identify Spots to Streamline That Process
Maybe there’s a redundancy. This might be something unnecessarily repeated in the process. For instance, someone is habitually taking pre-printed forms and re-keying all the information in them.
Or maybe a purchase requisition requires approval from number of people. But that process moves too slowly. It might be because a paper document is being passed between departments. That paper document should really be scanned and captured to a digital document management system for greater efficiency.
If you start to look, most companies can find ways in which they can streamline processes.
3. Start with Electronic Documents
Could you turn that paper-based form into an online form to begin with?
You may get to the end of a process and realize that, having digitized most of it, it’d be best to start electronic in the first place.
An entirely digital process allows you greater control over enforcing document workflows and approvals. And it gives you maximum efficiency so that business operations can be quick and easy.
If you want to manage, find, and share electronic documents faster, it can be done and doesn’t have to be painful. All you need is the right electronic document management solution.
Ready to learn more?
How to Go Paperless: Your Definitive Guide to Going Paperless in the Office has just what you need to get started.