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As a longtime participant and executive in the information technology industry, I've witnessed plenty of shifts, changes and disruptions driven by the continual advancement of technology. Phenomenal innovations like smartphones and mobile computers, ubiquitous e-commerce, cloud computing, and self-driving cars are all technological advancements that seemed like futuristic fantasies to many before they became new realities.
Yet some technology visions take longer to materialize than others. The "paperless office" is perhaps one of those lagging paradigm shifts.
Old habits apparently die hard. We've been talking about the paperless office literally for decades, butthe average office worker still uses some 10,000 sheets of paper a year. According to The Paperless Project (via Medium), American corporations "spend over $120 billion on printed forms, most of which become outdated within three months."
Don't get me wrong: Many organizations and most large companies have made great strides in removing or at least reducing paper from their business processes. Yet in my mind, the progress has not been fast enough, especially given the tremendous benefits that going paperless can achieve. Indeed, moving from paper to digital documents is a critical step in the digital transformation most companies say they want to achieve.
From my experience, however, there are numerous reasons companies don't achieve digital transformation and, specifically, the digitization of paper-based business processes. Fear of the unknown and fear of failure can freeze many organizations. Competing priorities for IT dollars also can place important digitization initiatives on the back burner. Companies may opt for spending resources to develop new applications they believe may generate new revenue streams rather than reengineering existing paper-laden processes to improve efficiency and save money.
Yet as the chairman of the board for a leading Silicon Valley-based provider of PDF technologies across business end user, enterprise automation and developer solutions, I'm keenly aware of the advantages business can achieve by moving to automated, paperless business processes. In addition, new technologies like artificial intelligence and e-signatures are making the move to paperless processes easier and more productive than ever.
Here are a few of the benefits you could see from moving your business to paperless documents and forms:
• Save money and a tremendous amount of storage space.
• Streamline and accelerate critical business processes.
• Enable customer self-service.
• Make accessing documents and information faster and easier.
• Reduce the time and cost of editing, changing, and redistributing documents and forms.
• Protect documents from getting lost or, worse, destroyed.
• Improve the security of your data and confidential information.
• Cut down on approval cycles.
There are basically two approaches to going paperless. Most companies will probably use both. One is to convert existing paper documents to digital. The other is not using paper in the first place.
If your company has many paper records and documents or continues to receive a lot of paper through mail, fax and other sources, you should install a high-performance scanner and server software solution to convert paper into scanned images and then into digital PDF documents. PDF is the one standard that allows you to create documents from virtually any software program that will print. You can make forms with fillable fields to collect the data that are entered. Just as important, using optical character recognition software, you can make scanned PDFs into text-searchable documents that can integrate into business processes. In addition, PDFs integrates easily with enterprise content management (ECM) systems, simplifying management.
New artificial intelligence solutions can now expedite the processing of these documents and the information within them, taking paperless transformation to new levels. AI software can look at a document, for example, and identify that it's an invoice and route it to accounts payable. More advanced AI solutions can do more, extracting information from inside the document for automated processing.
In many use cases, organizations are eliminating paper from the start. They're creating interactive PDF forms, for example, that are accessible via the web and mobile apps. Customers, partners and employees complete the documents online, dramatically accelerating the underlying business process and improving satisfaction levels. A company or government agency can save the completed digital form for its records while also pulling data out of the forms and entering it into a centralized repository.
If a business contract or official document requires signatures, the advent of cloud-based e-signature technology makes it much easier and faster to complete. Software can make the process of collecting multiple signatures fully automated, emailing a contract to multiple signees in succession until all signatures have been collected.
The transition from paper to paperless business processes is not a trivial undertaking. Depending on the complexity and scope of the change, there are business and process planning requirements, software engineering costs and employee change management needs. No technology-driven business change is devoid of some level of risk and cost.
Many digitization initiatives are either dead or successful before they begin. If key executives and managers are fully aligned and invested in making the change, chances are good the initiative will succeed. If not, the opposite is true. An organization must fully understand and map the investments and changes that will be required. It needs to define what applications, hardware, data center changes, security improvements and workflow adjustments will be required.
As part of undertaking a major transformation initiative, companies should consider creating a task force representing all the teams and work processes involved. Depending on internal resources, the organization will need to either assign the implementation team or, in some cases, decide what outside resources are required.
Nonetheless, the move toward paperless automation is rife with benefits for virtually any business, especially for organizations that are highly reliant on forms and contracts, such as healthcare, financial services, law firms, insurance and government. It behooves every manager to investigate just what they can achieve by accelerating the journey to a paperless business.
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