Now that you’re paperless, how do you measure the success of the initiative? On a high level, have you achieved your goals and fulfilled the mission of going paperless? On a day-to-day level, has the paperless office improved your employees’ work life and job satisfaction? To assess the system installation and setup, start by looking at how well you’ve digitized those three areas discussed at the outset: capturing, routing and retrieving information.
- Capturing information:
Are you able to quickly capture all of your documents in your ECM system? Have you reduced the number of redundant copies? If you’re capturing information effectively, you shouldn’t see people printing out copies for their own records to track it themselves. Capturing information in a paperless office should be significantly easier than it was prior.
- Routing information:
Are you able to process documents quickly in a digital workflow? One way to measure this is by how long it takes to process approvals. If it used to take five days and now it takes one day or less, that’s a big improvement. Test this by looking at the methods used in ongoing, or recurring projects. If filing a monthly invoice once took your accounting team a total of five hours from start to finish, and now takes as little as 45 minutes, you’ve saved more than four hours of working time for your team to work on other things.
- Retrieving information:
How quickly and easily are employees able to find the files stored in your system? A good gauge of success in this regard is how confident your end users are that they could go back and retrieve a document when they need it. This is another simple test that will have immediate results. Ask your employees to find a document that’s been digitized and have it emailed directly to you, if this is done quickly with ease, then your paperless systems are working successfully.
In the end, the main reason for most companies to go paperless is to improve efficiency, so that you’re able to take on more business with the same number of employees. Doing before and after comparisons of your essential business processes should give you a good understanding of everything you’ve achieved by going paperless.