Cut the Paper Before the Paper Cuts You

How much paper is too much paper? It’s obvious that our workplaces and oftentimes our home lives rely on paper for everything from packing slips, bills, and resumes, to grocery lists and “To do” reminders. When does paper become overwhelming? Most importantly, when does it become a burden to your organization costing you money and your employees’ time?

Paper, by way of applications, resumes, receipts, work orders, invoices, bills, and more, consumes time across an organization in how the company interacts with it. Human Resources, Accounts Payable, and Accounts Receivable, Facilities Management—even the holy grail of all business, Customer Service—is affected by the way paper is handled. Slow processing, difficulty retrieving files, incomplete information, duplicate work…these are all productivity killers, and customer service nightmares for a business.

How else does paper cut an organization? It takes up space! Numerous organizations have large file rooms or worse file warehouses. Since those files are stacked, oftentimes an employee (or team of employees) has the job to find, retrieve, and refile those documents in the appropriate order. This process consumes the employee’s time with low-value tasks; tasks that could be managed with technology, thus freeing up that employee’s time to focus on higher-value add tasks that truly require human intervention and decision making skills and abilities.

An Enterprise Content Management solution can combat these problems with paper consumption by eliminating wasteful, unproductive steps from an organization’s operational and administrative processes. Full disclosure: No transactional enterprise content management solution will fully eliminate paper from your business life. Paper will always exist, but it’s not necessary to work at a level in which paper is overwhelming and severely hindering your day-to-day business encounters. A smart, easy-to-use document management solution can seamlessly collect, organize, and index the multitude of documents and content an organization has into a single 360-degree view for smart decision making.