The Practical Guide Of How To Go PAPERLESS
Nearly everything you need to know in taking your 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
The Cost Of 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.
The Security Risk
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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.
Paper Impedes Workflow
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.
Introducing The PAPERLESS Office
The paperless office is the first step toward digital transformation in your organization. It refers to the deliberate removal of paper from processes, with the goal of improving efficiency. Digitization is at the core of the paperless office.
What Does It Mean To Go PAPERLESS
- Information that started as paper is transformed into electronic form. Documents are scanned, indexed, and stored securely in a central repository for easy retrieval
- Processes that were manual are now automated. For example, the right document management system will integrate with other applications for streamlined workflows across business functions
- You can access documents, any time, anywhere, and from any device. This is critical if you have multiple offices or employees that need access to documents remotely
What Are The Benefit Of Paperless Office
Here are three key enefit of going paperless and case studies showcasing how companies have benefited:
Reduced Operational Cost
Digitizing internal paper-based systems reduces printing and other operational costs:
- Storage costs: There’s no longer a need to purchase filing cabinets or use valuable floor space to store paper or keep hard copies for future reference
- Copying and printing costs: With digitization, you don’t need to create multiple copies of a file for distribution around the office. You can use a digital document management system to store one copy in a central place, for easy access
- Business process costs: Because you’ve transitioned from manual to automated workflows, you streamline business processes and reduce costs. For example, optimizing workflows can lead to faster payment collection and a reduction in purchasing costs
- Security and data recovery costs: Securing your data to multiple locations is easy and inexpensive. Recovering that data is even easier, with no impact on business continuity
Regained Time For Productivity
When content is stored centrally and correctly indexed, it’s easily accessible. Employees won’t have to waste time searching for those files and can quickly share information across your organization.
Easy access and the ability to share documents rapidly, speeds up processes and contributes to time gains in crucial processes such as invoicing, employee onboarding, and collections. For example, you can speed up automate invoice processing by automatically linking related documents like purchase orders, bills of lading, contracts and more.
You can also save time by integrating applications. For example, by integrating document management systems, invoicing, and customer relationship software, you’ll avoid siloing tasks and ensure the smooth flow of information.
Better Security And Compliance
Securing your data is in your best interest. If you don’t, you risk losing business-critical information that can have a negative impact on business continuity and client relationships.
Digital systems let you work in a safer and more secure environment: You’re better protected from security breaches due to document and communication encryption and can control who has access to specific files.
Maintaining compliance with mandates such as HIPAA and GDPR is also far easier, and you’re better prepared should disaster strike: Multiple and secure redundant backups help you effortlessly recover data.
Step-By-Step On How To Go PAPERLESS In 90 Days
Now that you understand the paper problem and the benefits of going paperless, it's time to show you know to launch a paperless process in 90 days
Ninety days serves as an achievable quarterly target. It’s not too long, which can cause employees to drag their feet — and it’s not too short, which can lead to poor implementation. It’s the perfect time frame to inject urgency while providing an achievable goal.
Here are the steps he followed:
Identify A Painful Process
Painful processes are tedious, impede workflows, require much human input, and remove employees from high-value work. Focus on common business areas that need digitization — including HR, accounting, marketing and sales. Then, identify specific processes that are reliant upon individual documents, such as invoice processing and employee reviews.
Create Leadership Team And Create Awareness
The success of any initiative will depend on getting buy-in from C-level executives and top management. That’s why it’s crucial you form an enterprise content management (ECM) leadership team consisting of these executives, directors and internal representatives of specific departments.
These representatives will feed information back from departments about both the opportunities and challenges of going paperless. Setting up this leadership team will ensure everyone is vested in the process, has a voice, and drives the initiatives forward.
Map Out The Process To Identify Digitalization Opportunities
Understanding all the steps involved in current processes helps you identify inefficiencies and pinpoint solutions to fix these problems.
Start by focusing on how employees in the organization handled documents in three core areas that are typically part of any process:
- Capturing information refers to how you capture documents that arrive at your organization in a variety of ways — email, fax and even physical mail.
- Routing information refers to how information entering your organization is shared with others — especially when they need to approve, review or take some other action.
- Retrieving information refers to the process of accessing documents.
To help organization map out current processes and pinpoint digitization opportunities, the following questions should be asked.
Design The Solution
The design step usually leads to excitement building as end users begin visualizing the final product and how it could benefit them. This solution will depend on your process, bottlenecks and the integration points.
- Don’t go too “thin”: Enterprise file synchronization and sharing (EFSS) systems like Google Docs, Box and DropBox are limited to storing and sharing files. These systems give us no control over user-centric security, workflow automation or retention policy capabilities.
- Don’t go too “heavy”: Similarly, be cautious of vendors that focus on “enterprise” solutions. These are usually complicated, expensive and extremely time-consuming.
There are vendors focused on small and mid-sized businesses with features built for real-world workers. A company like DocuWare, for example, provides unique solutions for various business areas such as employee management, marketing and sales, and yes, you guessed it, finance and accounting. What’s more, these solutions are cloud-based — and that does matter.
Does The Cloud Matter?
The cloud requires minimal maintenance compared to on-premises systems, allows for rapid deployment, enables solution acquisition at the departmental level, scales better, improves operational flexibility, and does not require huge upfront license costs.
Deploy Your Chosen Content Solution
The deployment will vary depending on your company, the solution and the vendor. You could, for example, start with a test system or implement it in several steps.
You can worked closely with your document management provider (Isatong Limited) and the IT administrator to implement the system in phases:
Phase one was the proof of concept
The proof of concept offered team insight into how (the solution would address their core business issues. Using their documents, the document management provider demonstrated how the software would automate and improve key processes.
Phase two involved iterations to the solution
Ideas for improvements to the design emerged after every stage of testing. The team wanted to make sure the solution was intuitive as possible. They accomplished this by increasing the use of checkboxes and drop down menus whenever it was appropriate. Team also can tweaked the workflow processes by breaking some tasks into two. Or, conversely, deciding it made sense to combine two processes into a single one.
Phase three consisted of rolling out the solution
Before the roll out, Team created awareness of the project to get end users excited about the upcoming changes. The team created a series of awareness that gave a high level overview of the solution. System administrators and power would be trained to use the solution first. Then spread the word about how the solution would automate routine tasks and make everyone’s work lives easier. Then end users came on board and reinforced the message. There is a company-wide lunch party to celebrate the launch of the new solution. Then the company was ready to go live.
The final solution included:
- Intelligent indexing to automatically read key data from invoices and match those invoices match invoices with related purchase orders
- The ability to automatically capture paper documents and quickly import invoices into searchable file structures
- Predefined workflow rules for routing documents
- Integration between the document management system and Quickbooks for better information flow
- A “Connect to Outlook” feature that allowed staff to quickly send, receive, and upload documents to a central location, directly from their email accounts
Document The Process And Measure Its Impact
You can’t implement a system and forget about it. Instead, view your paperless process as a constantly changing one you’ll likely want to replicate in other business areas as your organization grows.
Documenting the process would not only help with the successful implementation of a paperless office in other business areas but also with the transfer of knowledge.
How to measure the impact of digital workflows
Finally, Team lead measured the impact of the initiative to go paperless in 90 days by asking the following questions:
- Did we actually achieve our goal of going paperless in less than 90 days?
- Did the solution improve the way everyone in the department works? Has their productivity improved? Are they happier?
- How well did we digitize the three core areas—capturing, routing, and retrieving information:
- How efficiently are we capturing documents? Some positive indicators included fewer printed documents and employees raving about how efficient the new process was
- How quickly are we processing documents? Jason simply compared the new process with the old one
- Is document retrieval easier? Employees were spending less time searching for files and could confidently retrieve them
- How many work hours have we recaptured per employee, per week? Jason, together with Samantha and the HR department, reviewed the new overtime numbers which were far lower.
- What are the cost savings of storing less paper?
How ISATONG Help Organization Go PAPERLESS
Isatong Limited has been successfully supplying and supporting document scanning solutions in public and private organizations across Africa since 1995. Offering a one-stop shop for everything from consulting, conversion services, hardware solutions, document scanning, document re-organization, secured document shredding and electronic/analogue document management systems.
