The Practical Guide Of How To Go Paperless
Nearly everything you need to know in taking the first step towards Digitalization
Organizations today remain at the mercy of paper-based systems, despite available technologies to reduce paper usage, if not remove it, altogether.
In fact, only 18% of companies today can be considered truly paperless. Scary, isn’t it? What’s even scarier are the BIG problems with using paper. Handling paper is cumbersome, impedes productivity, reduces operational efficiency, and costs companies money — and a lot of it. Read on to learn more about the extent of the paper problem and everything you need to know about the paperless office and how it can help your business:
- What are the disadvantages of paper-based processes
- What are the benefits of a paperless office
- How your organization can become paperless in less than 90 days
The Disadvantage Of Paper-Base Process
Paper based system are cost-burden, Impedes workflow, and pose serious security threat
Cost burden
Gartner estimates that companies spend between 1 to 3% of their revenue on office printing. That doesn’t even account for the cost of filing, shipping and storing documents— let alone the cost of the actual paper.
In conducting original ROI research studying the cost benefits of investing in content management, Nucleus Research found returns $8.55 per dollar spent for SMBs alone. This report reveals the key benefits and best practices for small and medium sized businesses to start saving on every dollar and win back employees’ time.
And, let’s not forget the indirect cost: Paper-based processes are a time-suck and remove knowledge workers from more productive and high-value tasks. The time that employees spend on these unproductive tasks could be costing your company alot of money.
Impedes workflow
Office for Civil Rights revealed that paper records account for 62% of data breaches in companies of over 500 employees. This statistic shouldn’t surprise you. After all, paper is by its very nature impermanent, so unless you have a digital back up, you remain vulnerable to such breaches. You’re also open to theft and damage due to natural disasters, such as floods, which can impact business continuity.
Furthermore, printers, which remain common in many organizations, are insecure by default and also open to hacking — yet another security risk for your organization.
Pose serious security threat
The same IDC survey mentions that the wasted time associated with handling paper leads to a productivity loss of 21.3%. Indeed, many employees struggle to stay on top of daily tasks and workflows because they’re inundated with information and hampered by inefficient, paper-based business processes.Moving paper through your organization, without first converting it to electronic form, is notoriously slow. Information workers waste time capturing, storing, and routing documents to others due to manual processes.
These tedious manual processes, in turn, reduce operational efficiency and create a “document disconnect,” which results in delays and errors as documents move between critical business functions such as procurement, accounting, sales, and human resources (HR).
Many employees struggle to stay on top of daily tasks and workflows because they’re inundated with information and hampered by inefficient, paper-based business processes.
