Reducing print in your business can bring three key benefits: reduced cost, employee time savings and making processes more sustainable.
Let’s start with reducing cost - this is often a business objective across all departments and the idea lies in the fact that print can be expensive and by reducing the amount of printing done, the cost goes down with it.
Employee time saving might feel like the odd one out - how does reducing print save employee time? To start with, not having to print something removes the need to go to the printer - it might be a small time save, but it adds up and stops interruptions to a process.
Further to this is the rest of the process, by removing the print aspect, there’s a good chance that the process is digitalised, which brings increased time savings, as can be seen here.
Making processes more sustainable isn’t necessarily a business objective but it’s a nice thing to add to the list. By reducing the number of documents printed, it’s possible to reduce the amount of paper being used and likely disposed of in the office.
Now we know the benefits, let’s consider the actions and how to reduce print.
The first thing to note is that printing is both a habit and a normal business function. Often people don’t think about what they’re printing and why, they do it because that’s how it’s always been done and it’s part of the process.
Ultimately, beyond habit, there are only a few reasons that people print a document (learn more here: Why People Print):
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To store
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To annotate
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To develop thinking (e.g. making notes)
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To read
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To print for others (collaboration, signing)
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To write notes for others
With this in mind, the next step towards paper reduction is identifying the different processes in the office that use a lot of paper, and this is where analytics come into play. Using user analytics tools, you can identify where high-print is occurring and what process is causing the high print volume.
The next step is actually reducing the print volume throughout the business. In order to do this, here are three digital solutions that can help.
Robotics Process Automation (RPA)
Robotics Process Automation (RPA) can be used to automate repetitive, rule based business processes. This includes processes that are currently using a lot of paper at different points and involves a lot of printing.
The power of RPA is unlimited and ultimately, once you’ve identified repetitive, heavy paper workflows in the business, you can use RPA to automate them, remove the printing as needed and save employee time along the way.
Enterprise Content Management
Enterprise content management is all about the storage, accessibility and security of documents and content held by the company. In the past, this might have consisted of everything from filing cabinets to bits of online data storage.
With digital enterprise content management, the efficiency of your knowledge workers and dependent processes is directly related to how easily and quickly they can access content, irrespective of where they are and how they are accessing it.
The platform is robust and built for enterprise content sharing, unlike some of the cloud solutions that employees would resort to avoid using shared drives.
Electronic Signatures and Verification
A key reason for printing documents is to get a wet-ink signature - whether that be internally or externally.
The process usually goes something like this: you have a contract/document that needs to be signed, you either print the document and send it to the party that needs to sign it, or you email it to them and ask them to print it, sign it and scan it back in and send it back.
Either way, someone has to print the document in order for it to be signed. This whole process can be avoided by using electronic signatures and verification.
Electronic signature is a secure, legal way of signing documents that doesn’t require printing of documents. It allows you to keep the whole process digital and reduces print.
All of these digital solutions can help your company reduce paper and printing, but they also offer benefits beyond this in terms of increasing productivity, saving employee time, reducing cost and optimising current processes.