Every business has opportunities to switch from paper to digital.

How quickly your business can do that and to what extent will depend on the nature of your organisation and the industry within which it operates.

However, there are common processes that every business can look to digitise; here are 6 paper process to consider digitising today:

1) Approvals

When a contract, process or purchase needs to be approved, businesses will often turn to ‘wet ink’ signatures.

Whilst necessary in the past, unless a party involved has requested the use of ‘wet ink’ there are a huge number of electronic signature tools available which make the process far simpler.

Digitising this process saves time and paper.

2) Customer communication

You can’t stop customers sending you letters, but there’s little sense in passing paper documents like this around the company and archiving them in a filing cabinet.

Instead, scan all paper-based customer documents when they arrive and archive them digitally.

3) Job applications

When a candidate decides to apply for a job at your company, do they have to download a PDF form before printing, signing and posting it back to you?

Job applications are far better completed online in the digital age.

Transform those PDFs into approachable web forms sooner rather than later to avoid missing out on the best talent.

4) Education/Employee onboarding

New recruits are often handed a stack of paper procedures and introductory guidance that they’re expected to read and sign.

Instead, PDFs should be used to share such information. This gives new employees the ability to serve themselves without management intervention and without wasting paper. 

5) Manufacturing logistics

Running a supply chain on paper-based documentation is both expensive and a significant waste of employee time.

By using e-forms and electronic workflows, manufacturers can automate processes that were once paper-based and make them far more accurate and streamlined.

6) Banking services

Some banking services still conduct onboarding and customer support either in-person or via paper documentation.

In a world of secure portals and e-forms, this seems illogical; the modern consumer expects an experience that is both mobile and fully digital - not paper-based.

Realistically, these 6 processes are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to paper-to-digital transformation. Identifying the most inefficient paper processes in your business is a great place to start with digitial transformation. 

Remember though, one size doesn’t fit all, and if you can identify the processes we’ve listed above and review their suitability for digital transformation, paper usage within your business should start to decrease.