3 Examples of How Businesses Got Ahead Through Digitizing Their Documents
A study by the Association of Records Managers and Administrators estimates that more than 90% of business records created today are electronic. They would agree that for successful businesses, it is important to constantly strive to have the best practices and processes in place in order to get ahead of competitors, and thrive through efficiency.
With the state of technology today, and the speed with which it is advancing, it’s easy to see how failure to adapt to, and adopt new tools can leave a company behind in the dust. This blog addresses how 3 real companies ditched their reliance on paper and got ahead in the business world through document conversion and digitization.
Speed Up Performance
A large insurance company based in the UK provides multiple forms of insurance to their clients. This company partners with banks, and uses them as a channel to provide their insurance products to the bank’s customers. Because of the complexity of the insurance requirements from customers, the insurance company’s success had come from the ability to respond swiftly to the often varied demands.
In order to scale the organization efficiently, the company needed a way to streamline operational efficiency in responding to client needs. In order to achieve this, they spent time digitizing more than 100,000 documents through tools with similar capabilities to image printers that print to image.
This project helped shift the company towards a paperless office with simpler processes, and easier to manage electronic documents. With less effort required to sift through paper work, employees were able to pursue more streamlined processes, making document management much easier, and speeding up their ability to respond to client demands.
Reduce Storage Space
Law firms go through dozens of documents a day if not more, with each consisting of countless pages outlining various case details. Even a simple discussion can lead to a briefing spanning hundreds of pages.
For one of Canada’s largest law firms these documents lead to two very real problems.
The first problem comes in the form of storage. Having all these paper documents necessitates a lot of physical storage space which can be costly, and could be better used. This issue could easily be solved by converting the paper documents through print to jpg. Also, over time as more and more documents get added to the records, these spaces get more and more difficult to navigate, leading to the second issue.
When you have a large number of documents and you need to find one particularly quickly, physical storage does not facilitate easy searching. Depending on the complexity of the filing system, you can spend valuable hours looking for the right document on a case that is highly time sensitive. An easy fix would be to create pdfs for easy filing.
The law firm found a solution to both these problems in converting their paper documents into electronic documents. Electronic documents allowed for centralized storage of critical information, and allowed for easy searchability.
Not only did this reduce the cost and fees associated with storage, but it also improved the efficiency of the firm in finding critical documents, allowing them to better serve their clients.
Increase Searchability
One of the world’s largest corrugated cardboard manufacturing companies had had enough with their manual, labour intensive process of sifting through invoices for their accounts payable department. Their former process required thirty-two personnel to sort through approximately 35,000 purchase orders and financial invoices from over 10,000 unique vendors per month. With these numbers, it was easy to see how all this added up to frustration.
All these monthly documents required manual processing. To reduce these efforts, systems were put in place which allowed for automated approvals on files after they were digitized, or data enriched via a process similar to jpeg to tiff or convert pdf to tiff. By converting the paper invoices into electronic documents, specialized software would then recognize critical information fields and automatically process the information, removing the dependence of manual labour from staff.
The thirty-two employees were freed for reallocation to other areas of the organization where they could provide more value following the implementation of these new processes. The increased efficiencies also led to faster document handling processes, which in turn led to vendors being more accountable, as errors were caught much more quickly, and much earlier in the process.
Increase Productivity, and Manage Your Documents More Easily
With the above real world examples, it’s easy to see the importance of eliminating the dependence on paper documents, and switching to the far more efficient, easier to find, and less cumbersome electronic documents.
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