Less Paper … More Profit

In the Enron/Worldcom days, people laughingly referred to the ROI of a document management system as “Reduced Opportunity of Incarceration.” Compliance was a key driver. While these compliance benefits are still relevant, the benefits are far more positive and proactive than just ensuring the defensibility of your business processes. Yet, how does a paperless office really save you money?

1. Speed of retrieval and distribution
2. Response and customer satisfaction
3. Automation and no file shuffling headaches
4. Optimized storage physically and virtually through shortcuts and repurposing data

The majority of these translate to time savings, which often is enough to offset the cost of the technology you implement. But with a little thought and automation, you can quickly generate a return where the savings not only covers your spend but actually pushes your bottom line further into the black.

Speed of Retrieval

In a paperless system, you don’t have to remember what you named a document or when you worked on it.  Full text and keywords, as well as reference data from other sources, provide powerful ways to link and retrieve documents.

Response and Customer Satisfaction

Customers expect to be important enough that you can answer their queries quickly as if you were waiting for them to call. Also, of COURSE, you can remember everything about them off the cuff. Rapid retrieval of their information is the key to showing them just how much they mean. If you structure your system correctly, you can even help them serve themselves, and research their own information.

Automation

Now that systems can talk in real-time, documents can be offered based on specific business rules, elapsed time after it begins, based on events that happen in other systems or combinations of these criteria. For example, in contract management, expiring contracts can automatically serve up an editable version of the old contract to be repurposed. This eliminates the need to search for expiring contracts or recreating a new contract.

Storage Savings

Departments often have a need to share data where there are overlaps, between HR and Payroll, or Customer Service and Accounts Receivable. With these systems, a single document can be made available to multiple departments without a need to store multiple copies. There are often multiple copies in a hard-copy paper world, but without a database system behind it, we often see multiple copies digitally stored as well.

Once you have embarked on the initial transformation, there will continue to be opportunities to fine-tune your processes to create even more efficiency. With the right tools, working smarter isn’t a finish line, but an ongoing process that continues to drive your companies overall bottom line.