Partner Article

The Catch 22 in creating a truly digitised workforce

Business leaders are in a constant dilemma when transitioning to a paperless workplace. It comes as no surprise that paper remains an integral part of any business, but increasingly we are seeing a steady transformation towards a digital environment.

Folders with customer communication, invoices, memos and applications litter business desks and filing cabinets. With so much information at hand, such documents can easily get lost or not processed properly and as you can imagine, office life can suddenly become incredibly difficult with paper overload. For example, when an important client is on the phone but their documents folder has gone missing. Or, when a sales person needs to carry bulky envelopes with correspondence and contracts to each customer visit.

Put simply, if you don’t manage your paper and digital documents properly, you could be at risk of losing customers and revenue regardless of company size or the industry you work in. Being able to access important company information from wherever you might be, is vital for improving business efficiency.

Making information readily available

With so much pressure to reduce costs, optimise business processes and increase performance, it’s important not to forget the obvious things when focusing on the lessons learnt and the very solutions at our disposal.

Deploying advanced solutions such as Document Management Systems, Enterprise Content Management Systems and Digital Archives means that information is store in a centralised location. This helps control documents flow and ensure secure access by employees inside and outside the company building.

Centrally stored digital documents provides a critical business advantage that means content can’t get lost or be destroyed as typically a backup is updated regularly.

Several people can also collaborate on the same document, as a digital document does not need to be physically copied. This means that employees working remotely or on the move can download and access company information via a secure connection. It also means that there is no need for bulky office cabinets cluttering up the office room, with the extra space this affords a welcome byproduct of managing documents more efficiently.

Switching to digital

While scanning paper has been common practice for decades, nowadays saving simple scans in central electronic repositories is not enough. As one important limitation, scanned document images contain little additional information, and their text cannot be electronically screened and searched. Throwing out the aging filing cabinet is one way to manage documents more efficiently. However, digitising paper documents in centralised electronic systems offers a suitable and effective alternative to this. Documents created on a PC can be simply stored directly in the enterprise systems.

As digitised paper documents can be accidentally stored in a wrong digital library, it is crucial that they can be detected by inserting key words into a computer’s search programme. Using so called ‘keyword search’, all documents related to a certain topic can be displayed by a click of the mouse, and lengthy files can quickly be searched for information.

With this in mind, market intelligence reports demonstrate that almost 70 per cent of businesses[1] state that paper reduction is part of the improvement process, almost half of the respondents find time spent on re-keying data, searching for paper copies and filing is still the biggest issue caused by paper-based processes in their company. Storage volume and outsource paper store cost were named as the second biggest issue by over 40 per cent of respondents. Organisations need to pay close attention to the business processes that are causing such bottlenecks in the workflow system.

Searching for that document

By using Optical character technology (OCR) software, any document image can be turned into an electronic document containing searchable and reusable text, therefore making life much easier for businesses.

Advanced algorithms of such software pre-process the document images accordingly, detecting images, text areas and turning the ‘photo of a text’ into a ‘true text’ with 99.8 per cent accuracy. Some systems even allow adding meta-data, which is then transferred to the digital libraries together with the resulting documents.

These systems can be desktop-based software or even advanced document recognition and PDF conversion servers that run automatically in the company’s IT background and process a high volume of documents. According to the pre-defined workflows, such systems can turn millions of scanned pages for example into searchable PDF or PDF/A formats and make the need for physical paper storage obsolete. This helps with compliance guidelines, as well as extending the longevity of archived documents that are saved in such formats so they continue to be accessible in the long run.

So, in the paper war game who are the winners?

Industries with a lot of documentation such as the pharmaceutical industry and automotive industry as well as insurance companies, banks and larger legal institutions and libraries can significantly benefit from document management software. Many systems are quickly deployed, providing return on investment since the very moment of the purchase. Electronic documents that can be accessed, forwarded or distributed allows companies to increase customer response times and improve customer service.

Even with the vast benefits of ‘going digital’ including time and business efficiency, companies no longer need to spend time looking for misplaced or lost documents but while this may be the case, it seems that the paper documents will continue to rule the roost…for now.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Eva Weber .