The current business landscape is extremely competitive. One way to gain a competitive edge is by converting critical business workflows from print to digital. It is time to embrace the changing dynamics of the workplace and keep your company’s data safe and secure. Not doing so can cost your business valuable time and money—both of which could be redirected to other areas of your business.
1. Efficiency and Productivity Loss
The choice to transition to a paperless system can bring quantifiable results. Let’s run the numbers.
The average filing cabinet costs $25,000 to fill and $2,000 a year to maintain. This doesn’t include the countless hours spent organizing and maintaining a paper trail.
Employees, on average, use 10,000 pieces of paper per year. The average organization spends $20 per page to file. That’s $20,000 a year just to manage one employee’s use of paper.
The costs don’t end there. According to the Gartner Group, it takes about $120 dollars to search for a lost document. This cost doesn’t include the potential charges or financial damages incurred by a company should sensitive information get lost in stacks of paperwork, fall prey to flood or fire or make its way into the wrong hands
To make your team as productive as possible and ensure your business goals are being met, you need your team to be able to find information when they need it, and how they want it. Productivity is critical to delivering on objectives and keeping stacks of paper records wastes time, money and resources. Document management is a key tool leveraged by today’s most successful businesses and has laid a foundation for the next phase in document management evolution: automating manual and labour intensive tasks.
2. Inability to Maximize Shareholder Wealth
Investors want to see progress. What can you do that your competitors can’t? How are you continuously innovating and adapting? Strategically maintaining your company’s records is an important piece of this puzzle and embracing the digital medium can strongly support internal innovation which, in turn, helps strengthen shareholder confidence.
Internally speaking, during an era where Big Data is on the rise, failing to embrace the digital medium means sacrificing key metrics – metrics that could reveal your company’s financial health and opportunities for growth.
In a 2016 survey by Quocirca, Over 80 percent of executives cited business process efficiency as an important factor in the decision to go paperless. Do you count yourself in the 80 percent? You should. Efficiency ensures stability which resides at the top of most investors’ wish lists.
The cost of not going paperless can include deterioration in investor relations reducing business confidence. Research from ICT Security Magazine indicates that over 60 percent of enterprises have admitted to suffering from high-level data breaches in the last year. This creates a never-ending cycle of risk because when unorganized, data can become vulnerable, increasing the chances of such breaches. Such vulnerabilities can, however, be strategically mitigated, through digital document management systems.
3. Inability to Embrace Future Areas of Growth
As one of the key pillars that measure your business’ performance, consistently increasing revenue is critical to support internal growth and off-set rising costs. A study by the IDC indicated that 83.2 percent of respondents believe that streamlining business functions would have a positive impact on revenue.
By reducing paper-usage and embracing the digital medium, you can reallocate savings to enhance existing revenue streams and potentially develop brand new areas of revenue for your business. Your opportunities for internal savings and growth are virtually endless and can span your entire organisation from the front office to the back office: increase the sales force; augment R&D spending; improve capital structure; and facilitate a superior customer experience with better service.
It may not be realistic for your organisation to go 100 percent paperless. That’s ok. Significant gains can be realized by leveraging tools that reduce your use of paper wherever it makes good business sense. The most important thing to remember is that going “paperless” is a journey, not a destination. The process will take time, but we can guide you along the way.
There are numerous success stories associated with the decision to go paperless.
We worked with Grey Bruce Health Services to digitize their patient records and increase transparency in the order management workflow. In fact, Grey Bruce Health Services now saves almost 30 to 40 seconds on each order process, and have substantially reduced operation costs by making the transition towards paperless systems.
We have also made similar strides with the Ottawa Fertility Centre, automating their storage of patient records, and reducing paper workflows.
The math is simple: Not going paperless costs your business money—money that could be spent to more effectively address a more urgent organizational need.
Ready to learn how you can maximize productivity and efficiency, improve shareholder relations, and embrace the changing dynamics of the marketplace?
See how other executives are saving their businesses money through paper-less solutions. Visit RicohChangeMakers.ca #RicohChangeMakers
