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.
Compliance Issues
One of the biggest challenges associated with trying to maintain a paper record of all of your transactions and dealings with customers is compliance. The compliance organization overseeing your industry is likely to ask that you maintain your records carefully, and that means keeping a large amount of information in storage.
You may have to continue to show that you’re keeping documents secure and that you are using the latest protection tools. But even with these measures in place, some companies find they are penalized for not meeting compliance standards.
Business Process Problems
Keeping paper documents can also lead to a number of challenges within your organization. For example, if you lose a document, you’re likely to face questions from customers regarding the safety and whereabouts of their information. You may also find that your team is spending more time actively looking for the information rather than completing their work.
When using a document-based system, keeping everything in hardcopy can lead to a lot of time wasted on administration tasks. It can take your team several hours to find a document if they don’t know the exact location within the facility.
You may also find that you cultivate an environment of knowledge-hoarding when you use paper-based business processes. Paper documents allow team members to keep key documents to themselves without providing access to others. This can stall important projects for the company and minimize productivity levels throughout the organization.
Lack of Office Space
When you choose to use paper for every element of your business, you’ll soon find that you don’t have enough room for all of the materials you require within the building. Paper documents take up a lot of storage space. Not just in the paper itself but in the storage cabinets, lockers, and safes. So, you could be preventing your organization from growing by continually investing in storage for your paper products.
Another element to consider in this area is the total cost for all of your storage space. How much money could you save if you weren’t spending thousands of dollars a month on large amounts of space for your paper products?
Losing to Competition
Because your competitors are likely to be harnessing cloud-based document management systems, your paper-based processes are causing your company to lose out. Your competitors can currently meet your clients’ expectations quicker. For example, their staff can provide answers to your clients’ questions within a consolidated timeframe. Meanwhile, your staff has to review many documents to get the same answers.
Your company might also be struggling to manage its accounts payable processes. This is a common challenge with organizations that use paper-based processes as you have to bring together several documents to ensure that accounting work is completed effectively.
Your competitors can streamline this entire process by having all accounting details in one cloud-based system.
Lack of Business Growth
Your company cannot grow if you’re using the older methods of past generations. You require access to the latest tools in order to manage the many requirements of your organization for the years ahead. For example, one common problem failing companies face is dealing with information silos. This occurs when departments are not sharing relevant data with other parts of the organization.
So, your accounting team is not communicating with your marketing team, and your marketing team isn’t communicating with sales. Individually, these departments might be doing a good job, but they each might have information that is relevant to the other group.
For example, your sales department might have information about the lack of success in current marketing campaigns. They can see that sales figures are flagging in recent months, and this impacts the marketing team. Through cloud-based document management solutions, the sales and marketing teams can get on the same page and collaborate on team-based projects, allowing for higher levels of working productivity.
Our trusted team at MES is here to help your organization move beyond failing paper-based working processes. To learn more about the unique value of paperless office work, call us today.
