If you’re planning to go paperless, it’s important to have a timeframe for making the leap. “Paperless in 90 days” is a great achievable goal for many organizations and provides a rallying cry to get your team on the same page. Setting a goal of achieving the paperless office in less than 90 days also gives you a quarterly target to address and hit while helping to maintain momentum. And the sooner you reach that deadline, the sooner you start enjoying the benefits of going paperless.
When you think about what would need to happen in 90 days to consider the initiative a success, it boils down to setting goals for digitizing three areas:
Capturing information
Documents come into an organization in several ways, such as email, faxes, mail and forms. Each of these points of entry must be digitized. As faxes and paper mail go by the wayside, there’s less of a burden in terms of scanning, but capturing email is increasingly important. Creating a “smart inbox” allows people to quickly feed emails into the right channels of your system, whether that’s archiving it in your central document repository or using it to launch a business process. This ensures that the email is captured in a way that moves tasks forward, instead of piling up in individual email accounts.
Routing information
Once information enters your paperless office, it needs to be routed through the organization. Here, the goal is to replace paper shuffling with streamlined digital workflows, with predefined processes for routing, reviewing and approving documents.
Retrieving information
After the information has been routed, it needs to be archived in a way that allows for easy retrieval and managing access. You want to be sure your digital documents are captured, tagged and named correctly, so that they’re easy to find with a search.
As an example, let’s look at how this digitizing process would work in an accounting department. If your accounts payable (AP) process is largely paper-based, there may be several options for capturing invoices in electronic form.
First, you could ask your vendors and suppliers if they’re able to send you electronic invoices instead of paper. Whether you’re receiving electronic invoices or scanning in paper documents, intelligent indexing or intelligent capture tools are able to automatically read files and extract the essential information, such as the customer name, invoice number, amounts, etc.
Once that information has been captured, the ECM system could then use digital workflows to automatically route them to the appropriate queues for processing. This makes sure an invoice is routed to the right people for review in a predefined approval process. The final step is archiving the digital documents and accompanying data in the ECM’s central document repository, already indexed for easy retrieval later.
That’s just one example of what would need to happen to bring a department into a paperless environment in 90 days. The big win in this example is that you significantly reduce invoice processing time. Since the system is able to extract much of the important data, employees don’t need to spend a lot of time manually keying data into the index fields. And instead of having multiple copies of a document floating around, you have a single, authoritative record, stored in a way that facilitates anytime, anywhere access, which reduces the effort people must spend to manage files.
With a paperless ECM solution in place, you capture it once, process it once and store it once. To achieve this 90-day goal, you need the right paperless office software and hardware. To learn more about the solutions MES can provide for you, contact us today! 