Introduction to how digitization saves money, eliminates risk and optimizes efficiency at various levels.

Every growing business needs to manage a growing workload and reduce tedious, manual tasks, but a smart business manager seeks a solution that can capture significant ROI also. To help make the right choice for a smart solution, let’s walk through a typical day and determine your savings for five major business areas, to see if going paperless saves you money, time and effort for your business.

Irrespective of the industry and size, every organization develops and implements processes that help them successfully deliver customer satisfaction. These processes move information from source, via several touchpoints, to its destination. In most cases, processes are only as good as the people involved in it. While having a dedicated, motivated and loyal workforce means that processes work “efficiently”, manual and paper-based processes tend to become a serious drag on both efficiency and profitability when the business environment changes. Unfortunately, the per-unit price of paper transactions is so small that it goes unnoticed until it is consolidated – monitored & measured – and cancelled. A worldwide survey conducted by IDC showed a 21% loss of organizational productivity accounted for by manual versus digital document management.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced us all to find new ways of working, interacting and living. Managing digital information has become a key component of our collective effort to tackle the virus and support new ways of living and working. While many well-prepared organizations were digitally ready to manage information, many workplaces struggled to meet task turnaround times with an adverse effect on profits. The pandemic has toppled the notions of an office being a brick-and-mortar structure, approvals requiring a human signature and accessing information stored in filing racks and storage rooms. As industries redesign organizational culture, there is an amazing opportunity to shed the old and use-tailor-made digital solutions.

The right document management system (DMS) for your business not only overcomes delays and errors in processes, it also saves time and money significantly. Whether it is paper-heavy invoice processing, procurement, sales, marketing, finance or any other business unit in your organization, digitization can elevate performance and productivity.

If we consider Improved customer experience(retention), Productivity and Cost Savings as the key value drivers for judging the value of solutions, there are five areas where document management starts to pay for itself quickly.

Storage and Retrieval: The primary value of a Document Management System is to process, capture, store, manage and track documents within your organization. The DMS is a stable, predictable, measurable way to manage organizational information no matter its source or destination.

An effective DMS reduces the time you spend on storing or retrieving a document to a few seconds and if each department could manage to do 17.6 hours worth of work in a few seconds, it’s clear that there’s an opportunity for significant ROI.

Response time to inquiries: DMS capture, archive and process information automatically serving as a trigger for collaboration. By allowing workflow solutions to connect documents, tasks and people across the organization brings decisions makers together and reduces process turnaround time.

A centralized DMS is a stable, predictable, measurable way to manage your critical business information, start, execute and complete the process. So if a team member, client or vendor asks for a document you won’t have to locate and review the document in storage room shelves and files. Instead, the inquiry can be answered in seconds as the retrieval time with a DMS is down to seconds…and that is a simple and effective ROI.

Accessing multiple versions: Each document has a life span of its own, it has many versions, crosses many stages and is often handled by more than one person. It is also likely that in a large organization a single document has more than one possible future needs as well, but a paper-based system cannot cope with all this efficiency. With  a DMSyou can keep documents securely archived by assembling and archiving them in a secure and searchable repository and find them using intelligent information rather than digging through a folder-based maze.

Empowering your team with Information, not whenever it arrives but as soon as it is required makes a world of difference in work culture and efficiency.  This lets teams focus on innovation instead of procedural tasks.

Case-in-point: Your Marketing team has identified 10 personas for 200 prospective clients and spends 20 minutes creating marketing content for each. Your sales team then accesses these documents and spends 20 minutes filing them at each of the 3 stages of their sales process.

The marketing and sales team could definitely use that extra hour on revenue-generating activities instead of administrative tasks. With a DMS, version control capabilities automatically save edited documents as a new version and provide a documented history to ensure that everyone is, literally, on the same page.

Invoicing: A critical aspect of managing cashflows is invoice processing – both incoming and outgoing. The complete cycle of receiving a supplier invoice, approving it, establishing a remittance date, paying the invoice, and then recording it in the general ledger is a crucial daily task. So is the timely generation of invoices, ensuring that the invoice has reached your customer and proactive payment follow-up. With a customized automated solution, you can easily speed up the AP & AR process turnaround time.

Case-in-point: Your delivery person delivers 20 products to customers each day and spends 10 minutes receiving each paper receipt and 10 minutes submitting this to the accounting team. The accounting team spends 15 minutes on each receipt for review and confirmation of the purchase order.

That’s a full-day job for one person! Not to mention the delays caused by human error – data duplication, lost/misplaced/forgotten documents, transaction confirmation and more. A DMS implemented with merely a well-defined proof-of-delivery workflow can save about 30%-50% of the above-mentioned time. An ROI that can’t be denied!

Reclaim space from storage rooms, filing cabinets, printing nooks, and redeem the savings from the cost of printing and duplicating paper. Every operation needs communication, but not at the exuberant cost of paper. Digitization eliminates the need to order bales or plan recycling solutions for discarded paper. Beyond the actual cost of paper — distributing, filing, and storing paper is an expensive overhead. We guide you in digitizing paper-based communications to reduce printing and other operational costs.

Learn more about what processes to digitize and how to turn your business into a paperless office.