If you’re still working in a paper based office, you may have no idea how much lost time and money is spent dealing with physical paperwork. There are many challenges that come with maintaining a paper based office, that may be well hidden or incorporated into the everyday culture of the office space. Consider the following operational issues, do these sound like you?
1, Lost time due to manual routing of physical documents from department to department.
2, Errors caused by the manual entry of data from paper documents.
Inefficient document review and/or approval processes.
No formal policy or process for routing important documents as they come in.
If these concerns sound like common occurrences at your office, these small inefficiencies can add up to significant loss of productivity and revenue. The challenges of document management in a paper based office are not always visible, they may simply be ingrained into the processes of your company. If you’ve had to ask a coworker, whom asked another coworker, where a file or document was, then your paper system is failing.
Manually Moving Documents
When your employees transport documents to other colleagues, file storage rooms or otherwise, this may not seem like a large issue. Yes, it can be time consuming, but eventually the document ends up in the right hand. However, manually moving documents can be the cause of significant office distress. When this process is left up to humans, and human error, this could mean:
1. A certain employee does not have the information they need to do their job.
2. Payment of invoices could become delayed, resulting in financial implications like lost discounts or non-delivery of services.
3. Essential documents can be lost, resulting in a breakdown of your business
Where Automation Helps
The key to digitized document management is real time visibility into documents. Given all documents are located at a single source, your computer, your team and yourself can have constant access to all documents, at the same time. Gone are the days of passing paperwork back and forth.
With increased analytics and reporting embedded into the software, you’re given real time updates of invoices, revenue and more. This not only gives you a better understanding of your business, but increases overall accuracy. Digital documents are also far more ecofriendly, and increases overall productivity when employees are not spending time searching through documents themselves.
If you run a paper based office, it’s time to turn to a better document management system. To learn more about what we recommend here at MES, read up more about DocuWare, interactive digital management software!