| “With paperless communication, you no longer need to wait for your employees to come into the office and read a stack of memos,” Pledging for Change, an organization promoting sustainable business practices, said of moving to a paperless existence.
“Instead, they can stay up-to-date on business happenings through emails, newsletters and chat rooms, allowing you to have a well-informed workforce.” |
On top of that, cutting ties with paper will allow a company to transition to make their operations more environmentally friendly.
Saving paper equates to saving trees and using less overall supplies, which could position a company ahead of its competitors in terms of positive consumer sentiment.
To help companies transition toward a paperless office, Pledging for Change shared some useful tips.
Stop paper memos
Getting rid of paper notes and communication and setting up a staff email account or communication system is the first step toward saving paper. People in the office often do not even realize how much paper they are using, but it definitely adds up. Minor changes can have significant impacts on reducing paper consumption.
Digitize documents
“Next, transform your paper records into digital ones by dedicating some workers to the task of scanning in these documents and digitally filing them,” the blog said. “After checking the integrity of your scans, securely destroy these now antiquated paper documents.”
With digital documents and a document solutions program, companies will no longer have to worry about using hours or even days of time looking for lost documents. Instead, everything will be available instantly via a computer search.
Paperless payments
This feature may go overlooked by many companies, but most bills can now be taken care of online. Instead of worrying about when to send a check in, businesses can instantly pay bills online with the click of a button once a paperless billing process is requested.
Allowing your own customers and clients to utilize paperless billing is a great option too.
How does going paperless affect different industries?
Paperless Law
The legal industry is one that has been transitioning to a paperless existence. A legal information site Keylaw gave some additional advice for firm’s interested in going paperless; lawyers looking to go paperless should have scanners, programs that help gather all of the documents in one place, such as an ECM system, and have all computers linked together on the network for easy file sharing.
The recent requirement for eFiling have also contributed to the paperless push.
Paperless Healthcare
ECM has garnered significant media attention in the Healthcare industry lately with the “electronic medical record” system proposed by President Obama.
An article in USA Today reports that although only 1.5% of the hospitals in the United States currently use a comprehensive electronic record, the advantages of electronic content management in a health care setting are obvious: stored in electronic format, patient records like immunizations, allergies, x-rays and other data are immediately accessible, allowing clinicians to make better healthcare decisions, and make them faster.
Paperless Manufacturing
H.A. Guden, a New York manufacturing company has all quotes, drawings and other paperwork stored and displayed electronically for any employee to access quickly and easily.
The customer service department is one sector benefiting greatly from going paperless by gaining the ability to pull up customer information within seconds instead of having to dig around old file cabinets.
A drastic reduction in paper dependence was facilitated through eliminating their manual fax machine. Inbound faxes at Guden can now be received through email and displayed on computer screens instead of having to be printed out every time.
The new system also safeguards valuable information and protects documents in the event of a disaster.
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About Jonathan Beaton
I was searching for Paperlessoffice and found your blog. Really nice article though. Please keep posting about these things. Thanks, Franzi.
Hello, great read on that one about Paperlessoffice. Nice blog. Keep up posting! Cheers, Rebekka.
Good post about the paperless documentation. Nowadays paperless communication is growing very fast due to the availability of document management software. I think this way of documentation is very efficient and safe.