A popular trend among businesses of all types is to go paperless. By going paperless, companies expect to operate more efficiently and save some money. But how much is your paperless office really helping your company? Fortunately, you don't have to guess at this. Here is how you can measure the impact of going paperless:
Document management system effectiveness
A document management system should be an integral part of your newly paperless office. It is the glue that will hold all of your digital activities together. It should also be enhancing your operational efficiency in the following ways:
Entering data
A document management system can enhance your data entry capabilities with auto-complete features that reduce the number of steps you need to take to complete a document. To measure how effectively your document management system is doing this, count the number of times a document that included auto-complete data was created.
Sharing data
Your document management system should include cloud-based capabilities that allow you to share documents instantaneously. To measure its effectiveness at doing this, see how long it takes to completely process a document that must flow through multiple hands.
Retrieving data
A key feature of any document management system should be an enhanced ability to retrieve documents. You can analyze your system's effectiveness at doing this by measuring the average amount of time it takes to access a single document from the start of the search until the document is found.
Data security
Going paperless should provide you with enhanced data security by making your documents inaccessible to unauthorized parties, even if they have the data source in their hands. To this end, your document management system should encrypt data during both storage and transmission.
Document management system usage rate
It doesn't matter how effective your new paperless office is if nobody is taking advantage of the resources that it provides. To determine how often your paperless document management system is being used, be sure to track how many times they login, and how many hours they use it per day.
How your document management system is being used
Knowing what your employees are using your document management system for will give you deeper insight into how it is helping you in two ways. First, by taking note of the most popular features among your employees, you can determine how it is helping. For example, heavy use of a system's search feature indicates that it is streamlining your team's ability to find files.
Second, this allows you to know what features that you must retain for future document management systems.
The difference in document costs
Paper is expensive; sometimes you don't realize just how expensive it is until you look at the numbers. That being said, an investment in a document management system will not only cut back on your paper use, but reduce your document costs as a whole.
You can analyze this by measuring the estimated annual cost of your new document management system against your post-paperless office paper use. If the reduction in paper costs are not significant, then you should look at ways that you can further integrate your paperless office solutions into your daily routines.
You should continuously enhance the way that going paperless enhances your office
You don't have to assume that your paperless office is enhancing your business. You can look directly at the facts and see just what type of impact it is making. Remember that no matter how great of an impact your paperless office is making, you can always enhance it with new digital solutions for your needs.