5 Gifts Document Management Will Bring Your Company
A good integrated document management solution will bring the same core benefits to any department or businesses in any industry. Read on to see how your organization could be positively affected:
The gift of space: The average office worker in the United States uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year. Sure, some are shipped off or disposed of, but much of that paper hangs around, to be filed or stacked or boxed up. The Association for Information and Image Management’s (AIIM) most recent report found that the average physical space that stored paper takes up in offices is 13.5%. While this number varies greatly between different industries and departments, AIIM still found that respondents suggested an electronic repository would cut this number in half—to 6.7%. An integrated document management solution can capture all of those documents through myriad ways (scan, email, fax, print, OCR, etc.). Once captured, the solution can place them into an electronic workflow, make them available for easy access and sharing or automatically distribute to recipients (again, through many methods and in many file formats).
The gift of time: One now-paperless customer recalls spending “one to two hours per week just filing paper.” That’s a lot of time that could be spent more productively! For that particular company, those numbers alone made it “apparent how document management would save the entire company time and increase productivity.” With a document management solution in place, your organization’s employees will no longer have to scan, copy, print and store documents, search for documents or recreate lost files. By automating tedious and drawn-out business processes—like invoice approval, for instance—you may be able to remove steps altogether to increase office efficiency.
The gift of security: With document management, security permissions can be set per user, controlling what each employee can view, edit and create. Document histories are accessible too: the solution will track who has accessed and edited every file. Also, integrated document management software will keep your files safe from natural disasters. One company, for example, survived a Category-4 tornado because they were already using an integrated document management system. How’s that for peace of mind?
The gift of versatility: An important feature of document management solutions is that many can grow with your organization. As your business evolves and undergoes changes, your number of users and/or documents may increase. For some companies, this could cause problems and slow down processes even more, but for a paperless company, this is no problem. Plus, if you start in Accounts Payable but later decide you want Human Resources to go paperless as well, that’s no problem!
The gift of money: And last but not least, an obvious outcome of these four benefits (and perhaps the most popular gift of all) is cost savings. The most recent AIIM report found that an impressive 77% of organizations that have gone paperless achieved ROI on their paper-free investments within 18 months. Once you’ve gone paperless, your paper, toner and storage bills will decrease or even disappear. Some companies have been able to completely remove department positions altogether. Not only will you save money with a document management solution but your software will streamline business processes to encourage and support growth too.
