Moving away from paper-based processes and embracing the benefits of digitisation can increase productivity and transform the user experience
72 percent of companies already have some paper-free processes in place and are planning more, according to senior IT leaders surveyed in Quocirca’s Managed Print Services Landscape Report, 2015. There is a growing appreciation of the benefits of digitisation – more and more business leaders are realising that a digital-first strategy will increase competitive advantage by improving responsive efficiency, strengthening security and reducing costs. And many companies experience ROI in 6 months or even less!
The benefits of digitisation for your enterprise
Right now you have users across multiple departments who need access to the same information and who may all need to make updates. With paper-based systems you may have only one copy or, worse, you end up with endless numbers of copies, with every one of them updated separately. Statistics show that five percent of all paper documents are lost or misfiled, and employees spend 40 percent of their time looking for the information they need for their daily routines.
External stakeholders such as customers, suppliers and partners are likely to be among the 72 percent of companies in the process of digitising their operations, and will have expectations of digital communication and information delivery with your organisation.
With digitisation, these messy time-consuming workflows go away. Suddenly, any number of users, anywhere in your organisation, and beyond, gets instant access to all the business information they need. Multiple users can update the same information resource at the same time, with each change instantly available to everyone who needs it. The scope for losing documents is greatly reduced and employees can find data far more easily. Specific digital workflows can be set up for functions like sales, marketing, HR, accounts, contracts and the mailroom – but could well be applied to any paper-heavy process. Well-designed workflows tend to be a combination of 80 percent proven technology and 20 percent bespoke configuration.
What’s more, digitisation also gives you complete control – managers decide who can see what and when they can see it. They can assign roles to specific people – nominate who is to be responsible for each part of your business process – and know they have all they need, exactly as they need it. And version control becomes a reality – an audit trail of change can be generated automatically.
That gives you vastly improved security, with no papers getting lost or misfiled, delivering huge cost savings and time efficiencies in paper and printer supplies alone.
The benefits of digitisation for your customers
You’re working to provide competitive solutions to your customers, and every benefit your enterprise gets from digital directly helps them. You’re able to respond far faster with the very latest information. There are no more delays for you or your customers in retrieving documents from paper storage, no constraints on how often or in how many ways you can reuse your information. You become more responsive, adaptable, fine-tuning your processes to give your customers the very best.
Meanwhile, the risk of serious errors is reduced because digitisation will simplify your business processes dramatically. There is no need to rekey information from paper to system. There is no duplication of data input. So there are far fewer opportunities for mistakes.
It’s the same with business-to-business interactions, your supply chain and other stakeholders, such as partners. Digitisation means that information is visible in real time right across the enterprise to everyone who needs it. Every person, every department, every division is empowered to do its very best. And that also means new opportunities for collaboration with external stakeholders.
What are you waiting for?
You’ve always been at the centre of what your organisation is doing, and now you are the one who can deliver the benefits of digitisation to the business. That means you’re also the one who will see the benefits, who will be able to measure the benefits and leverage every advantage. Right alongside everything else that digitisation brings to you, your business and your customers, there is complete visibility of every step. You can see what information is being used and what is not, you can see where there is demand, you can track which processes lead to which benefits. You can use the business intelligence tools that accompany digitisation to finally get a complete and clear picture of exactly what’s happening right across the enterprise, how users are behaving, and what they need next.
It’s time to take a serious look at the latest digitisation and workflow services and technologies that are making this competitive leap possible. But you don’t have to face this challenge alone. A reputable MPS provider is able to map all paper-based processes, identify bottlenecks, and quantify exactly how many staff hours and costs can be saved through the digitisation of specified processes. This makes the benefits of digitisation very tangible for the board.
Takeaways:
- Digitisation streamlines your processes and makes you responsive to customer needs
- You get much greater security with digitisation, because documents are no longer lost or misfiled
- Digitisation means no more delays waiting to retrieve paper documents from storage