As a business owner always seeking innovative and efficient methods to improve operations, the benefits of a paperless workplace should be front of mind.
Each individual in the United States uses more than 500 pounds of paper each year, with the paper production process accounting for 40% of global industrial logging.
A paperless office uses digital technologies to reduce paper consumption in the workplace. Many executives opt to go paperless in order to save money or boost employee productivity. If you are an executive or manager, you should consider spearheading the shift to a paperless office for better and more efficient document management.
What is a Paperless Office?
A paperless office, often known as a paper-free office, is one in which the use of paper in company processes is reduced or eliminated. To shift to a paperless workplace, the team translates documents into digital formats to use less paper. Other paperless practices, such as digital communication, electronic signatures, and digital record-keeping systems, assist the office in maintaining its paper-reduction efforts.
Going paperless may necessitate access to electronic and digital infrastructure, such as high-speed internet or a computer for each employee, as well as the staff who can operate digitally. For a successful transition, it is critical to select digital solutions that match the capabilities of the employees.
Benefits of a Paperless Office
If those figures aren’t enough to entice you to go on your digital transformation path for a document management solution, perhaps these 8 advantages of going paperless will:
- Easy Access to Data
You may readily retrieve crucial material from anywhere with the press of a mouse. Tools like Google Drive, Microsoft Office 365, and others guarantee cross-platform and user cooperation.
Depending on your individual company goals and demands, information may be made available to numerous employees with minimal effort and time. Digital documents that are properly indexed and have relevant file naming conventions will make your PDFs easier to search, download, and distribute.
- Document Security and Confidentiality have been Improved
To preserve document security and secrecy, you must invest in lockable file cabinets and paper shredder rules when using paper to power your company activities. Even so, you’re still dealing with possible data breaches as well as the constant need to educate personnel on your document management policy.
Many cloud-based content management systems, on the other hand, provide high-tech, bank-level data protection to keep information safe from individuals seeking unauthorized access to important data.
With correctly indexed files and simple rules, paperless document management software makes it easier than ever to find, distribute, and keep documents.
To ensure quality and compliance, our document management software includes comprehensive document control features like security, 2FA, audit trial, records retention, and version control.
- Automatic Data Retention & Digital Backups
Employees are no longer necessary to generate backups of every document manually when it is possible to do it digitally with the correct tools and platforms.
Data may be automatically saved to the cloud, flash devices, or external hard drives. This allows digital data to reside in several locations rather than a single paper source, lowering the chance of damage, loss, or misplacement.
- Cost-Effective
You may operate your business more cost-effectively without having to purchase ink cartridges and office supplies, in addition to saving money on mailing charges. Finally, using copiers and fax machines may help to cut overhead expenditures. - Adhere to Audit Guidelines
As a firm, you will almost certainly need to save many years of data for audit purposes. When you use electronic solutions for document and content management, you may readily and efficiently store as much data as you need while still adhering to audit standards and norms.
To make the procedure more efficient, the new digital data will instantly establish an audit trail by merely scanning searchable text.
- Daily Data Storage and Supply Costs are Reduced
When you stop storing files on paper, you may save up hundreds of square feet of space.
In a big U.S. business, a document is lost every 12 seconds, with an average duration of 18 minutes to locate the missing document. Although it is not a significant amount of time, it is time that might be spent searching electronic PDF documents using OCR/ICR.
- More Time is Spent on Important Tasks
While your staff is losing productivity by processing physical papers and you are searching through cabinet drawers for information, it is feasible that you might have accomplished significantly more in far less time.
For example, you may have identified the necessary data, processed it, and even connected with a client or supplied a product or service.
Effectively indexing and classifying digital data might help you save time on crucial activities that don’t immediately affect your bottom line.
- Better Customer Service
The faster and more cost-effective you can conduct business, the happier your consumers will be. You’ll be able to receive and process orders more quickly, deliver on time, and save money over time – all while contributing to a positive customer experience.
Happy customers are repeat customers, and they are also clients who will recommend your services to others.
Final Thoughts
It’s easy to become stuck in a rut and carry on as usual, especially if it’s been working for years. Although this is a handy method to manage your business, it also implies that your operations may stagnate, perhaps lagging behind your competition.
Don’t dismiss the benefits of a paperless office because your company is established in its ways.
Oriental Solutions recognized the need of the hour and adapted; we have introduced numerous services to our repertoire, one of which is “Document Management Solutions.” It is a system that uses computer programs to track, organize, and save papers in order to make the globe a paperless zone. In addition, as a document management firm, we provide content extraction, management, and archiving at the client’s request.
Increase productivity, streamline workflow, save office supply expenses, and convert paper documents to electronic versions to become green.
Contact Oriental Solutions today if you want to learn more about document management solutions or get started on a project to kick-start your digital transformation journey.
