There is a paperless revolution going on right now – companies of all kinds are scrambling to renovate their business models, and revolutionize their business processes, with an eye towards paperless operations.
When you think about it, the benefits of a paperless office are enormous. Here are some of the major reasons companies are making the change and investing in paperless processes that will cut waste, boost efficiencies and give a company a better reputation in its industry.
Saving Time and Effort
The life cycle for paper documents takes time. It requires faxing, collating and stuffing paper into folders. It requires a lot of legwork to get necessary signatures on paper.
By contrast, paperless designs can easily move to where the user is anywhere in the world. Multiple stakeholders can sign off on a deal in minutes. Paperless documentation really increases efficiencies for nearly any sort of company.
A Carbon Footprint
In today's business world, consumers and other parties are putting a premium on green business.
Many would say America is behind where it should be in terms of tangible, concrete incentives for green business. But the public sentiment is there – people value companies that do business with an eye toward the environment. With this in mind, paperless office processes can greatly reduce a company's carbon footprint, and increase its value to customers who are environmentally minded.
Discovery at Your Fingertips
Here's another excellent reason to go with a paperless office model.
Discovery is the process of getting information from held assets. It's often used in the context of legal discovery, but similar processes can yield enormous amounts of business intelligence.
When companies have their records and documents in digital format, they can instantly search them and recover all sorts of useful information. However, when those documents are on paper, they're not accessible to an IT architecture. Data can't flow through the system – it just sits there enshrined in physical ink and paper. That inefficiency is enormous, and it's a major reason companies are restructuring their operations to accommodate a paperless model.
Taking Up Space
Some of us saw the pictures of the U.S. Veterans Affairs office some years ago, where towering stacks of paper threatened to collapse floors. That's an extreme example, but the fact is that paper documents take up space and require physical storage. By contrast, someone can hold the equivalent of a room full of physical documents in their hand in a flash drive.
Think about using A&A’s document scanning and paperless services to become one of these leaner, meaner businesses operating on efficiencies. Our programs put an emphasis on quality and usability, with despeckling and deskewing procedures and support for PDF and TIFF archival formats. Look at your options for transforming your business model for the years to come.