Businesses of all sizes have recognized that paperless solutions offer a number of benefits, including financial savings and greater operational efficiency. To highlight one particular instance, the Memphis Daily News tells the story of nexAir, a Memphis company that learned the benefits of the paperless way after it adopted a workflow management solution in 2008. The company, which specializes in distributing gasses such as oxygen and nitrogen, started going paperless in its accounting department and quickly realized the rest of the company was wasting paper and money as well.
When customer inquired about their order, it required invoices and delivery receipts to be printed off, which Patrick Galphin, director of nexAir’s marketing, said wasted about three pages of paper per phone call-and they receive a lot of phone calls. nexAir put in an ecommerce solution, which brought a new workflow to the company, so paper wasn’t being printed off with every phone call. Customers could now log on to a website to access documents and view information they needed directly.
“We started recognizing repeat offenders,” Galphin said, according to the Daily News. “After that, we went to customers who did this and offered the ecommerce feature that we customized. It was very well-received. They were a little surprised we were so late in bringing it to them.”
Improvements in customer service are just one of the advantages realized, though.
Galphin said even simple solutions have been paying dividends, such as giving employees an extra computer monitor to look at information and documents electronically instead of having to print out files all of the time. He said they have seen at least a 20 percent improvement in efficiency and productivity as well as a dramatic reduction in paper costs with what he calls a “fairly simple improvement.”
Before implementing a document management program, companies should assess their needs and determine the scope of service they require in order to improve their overall operations. During their document solution selection process, businesses should contact vendors and ask them whether their products include e-filing cabinets, easy-to-use document tracking features and strong security protections.
Effective document management programs will provide companies with these features and many others that will allow them to improve their productivity and shave money from their budget. By improving file security and accessibility, these management programs can make life easier for employees, as well.
About Martin Levesque
I haven’t had the pleasure of working much with an electronic document management system in an enterprise setting, but going digital has done wonders for my personal workflow – a good scanner and Evernote now takes care of the vast majority of my paperwork, and I’m in the process of whittling down the rest so that I only retain documents where originals need to be kept – at which point I’ll be as paper free as I’ll ever be.
What most people ask me about from a personal perspective is how I’m able to retrieve papers when I need them, which is obviously at the crux of the matter regarding whether we’re discussing enterprise or personal systems. For me, the retrieval speed has increased by a factor of at least 5; a bit of careful tagging combined with (slightly limited) search capabilities gets me there in two steps as opposed to having to dig through carefully sorted folders with information I rarely – if ever – retrieve.
I’d see this as one of the major factors in an enterprise setting, too – that is, convincing individuals that they can easily retrieve what’s stored in the system without fear of UI or storage breakdowns. Get close enough to the simplicity of using paper, and you’re there.
/Jørgen