How a paper trail can lead you to the problems

If your business is embarking on a digital transformation strategy, part of the aim will be to move away from print. It therefore makes sense to follow your paper trails in order to identify the processes that can be improved.

Who’s using the most paper?

The more paper-intensive a process, the less likely it is to be efficient.

With a managed print services (MPS) partner on hand to help, you’ll be able to find which departments are using the most paper within your business.

The analytics employed by MPS providers will also hunt down the paper-intensive processes that can be improved and pinpoint exactly which part of the process is increasing paper usage.

It stands to reason that wherever there’s a lot of paper being used, there’s probably an equal amount of human interaction involved in dealing with it.

People tend to create and use paper-based information, but their time would arguably be better spent on more value-added work than dealing with paper documents. It’s therefore vital to follow the paper trail and discover who the biggest culprits are.

How to find the inefficiencies

Paper trails will lead you to the paper-based problems facing your business.

When conducting your investigation, look out for the following common warning signs:

• we know that over 50% of printed pages are thrown away, so look for annotated paper documents that are disposed of soon after use;
• digital gaps in processes (where digital information needlessly makes the transition to hard copy) are often created by people sharing documents on paper that would be much better shared digitally;
• some departments may clearly demonstrate that too much time, space or resource is being dedicated to managing paper archives (for instance, printing and managing invoices in the accounts team); and
• people sometimes print documents for ‘record keeping purposes’. Does a record really need to be kept if it also resides on a file server?

Defining ‘good’ and ‘bad’ paper within paper trails

Not all paper is bad, therefore it’s important to keep in mind the following examples of what may or may not constitute good physical documentation:

• Good paper refers to documents that have a valid reason to exist in hard-copy form. Examples include:
• documents that arrive on paper, such as handwritten letters or signed contracts;
• legal documents that require a ‘wet ink’ signature to be valid; and
• documents that certain stakeholders within the business will only deal with if in hard-copy.

• Bad paper refers to documents that have been either kept or reproduced as hard copies but have no reason to exist in that form. Examples include:
• documents that arrive in a digital format (for instance, via email), but which are reproduced in print;
• documents that have never been given consideration for digitisation; and
• documents that require physical systems to be stored, transported and shared.

We’re some way from the future of a completely paperless office, but as we’ve demonstrated above, the clues to your most inefficient processes will lie within your paper trails.