Working from home is a concept we've been familiar with for a long time now—but the COVID-19 pandemic turbocharged the remote working scene. Almost overnight, scores of people worldwide started working from home—even professionals like doctors, lawyers and teachers (who we never imagined would work remotely)!

Startups do things digitally. But companies that have been around for decades largely don’t. It seems impossible to believe, but 82% of companies are still paper-based. 

“With all the lip service paid to innovation, it’s astounding that most businesses still use technology invented more than 2,000 years ago. We’ve entered the era of 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and missions to Mars — yet only 18 percent of companies consider themselves paperless.”

—Corp! Magazine

With cloud servers and apps like Monday, Trello, and Evernote replacing paper calendars, notebooks, and whiteboards, it seems crazy to think that less than 20% of all companies in 2020 operate digitally. Not so crazy, though, when you consider that computers weren’t even part of the office environment 40 years ago.

Let’s take a look at the brief history of paper to digital documentation and nail down when paper processes will finally go digital.

New employee: “I can’t find the printer and I need to print something.”

Coworker: “We don’t have one. And no you don’t.” 

Startups do things digitally. 

Invoices, receipts, and business cards are digital. Any paper that does come in—usually from the government—gets digitized and put in the cloud and that paper is recycled immediately. Post its and wall-hanging calendars are replaced by apps like Monday and Trello and Teamwork. Notebooks swap for task managers. Clutter disappears and productivity soars. 

Document scanning turns paper files into digital documents. Document management is a system that tracks digitized documents, ensuring accountability, transparency, organization, knowledge retention, shareability, and productivity.

Each year, the global paper usage is about 400 million tons of paper. Using paper in offices is inevitable. However, the growing technology in document management is enhancing the efficiency of this process. 

Companies in a wide variety of industries are now using document management systems to reduce their expenditures and improve the efficiency of their working processes. Our team at MESHDS has decades of experience in working with document management technology. In this new post, we’re explaining a little more about how document management systems can help reduce costs.

Office automation can be something that a lot of businesses are reluctant to implement. This is because they assume that they are going to need to replace staff members. Then, employees worry because they fear that they are going to be out of work because of all these changes that are coming into play because of tech developments. However, automation is not about replacing staff with software. Instead, it is about streamlining daily tasks so that your team is able to focus on those problems that technology is not able to solve. With that being said, in this blog post, we are going to take a look at how automation is going to change employee roles. 

Document management has taken on even greater importance at all businesses. We have always had the need to manage documents and data. However, it seems that the amount of data we’re handling is growing at a monumental rate. Because of this, we need to have efficient processes in place to manage everything securely and effectively. With that being said, in this blog post, we are going to take a look at some of the data and content management trends that have been dominating the document management industry so far in 2019.

While you might be committed to the old ways of doing business, these older techniques could be impacting your bottom line and actively damaging your organization. Our team at MES is committed to helping free your business from the challenges of paper-based processes. And in this latest post, we’ll explain why as we look at the problems that often arise in a non-paperless office.

Companies are now dispensing with paper documents and building paperless environments in which communication is frictionless and collaboration is streamlined. Our team at MES has helped many businesses capitalize on the value that paperless document management brings to their teams.