The Road to Digital Transformation
While it’s fair to say that BYOD and the wider use of mobile devices resulted in a steady decline in paper usage - the reality is that the paperless office is still a pipe dream for most.
It’s not that we are lacking the technology to go paperless, it’s that we don’t want to get rid of paper in our day-to-day activities. One of the biggest barriers to transforming from paper-based to paper-free processes is a resistance to change, and despite the contention that hard copy workflows are an inhibitor of efficiency and growth, people keep using paper because that’s what they have always done.
In fact, one of the key findings of a digitization and workflow automation study conducted by Quocirca in 2016 was that paper remains a key element of many businesses. Quocirca interviewed 200 organizations in the USA, UK, France and Germany, and respondents reported that 27 percent of business processes are paper-based. The top reasons cited for paper were: physical signatures (55 percent), customers/suppliers require it (48 percent), and most notably, that staff prefer paper (41 percent).
The Digitization Journey
Businesses are drowning in data. Every day they are faced with exponential amounts of information flowing into and out of their organizations from various and disparate sources. This has created a pressing requirement to improve operational efficiency and drive growth through digital transformation.
This is recognized by over two-thirds (69 percent) of the business process automation leaders polled by Quocirca, who said that digitizing documents is very important to their information management strategy.
Paper has its constraints, it must be physically moved, space is required to store it, it slows down business transformation and it can get lost. Moreover, unless hard copy documents are scanned, unlike soft copy files, the data they contain can’t be used in digital workflows or be accessed from a common storage system.
Businesses must plan their information management strategy to seamlessly connect the physical and digital data worlds, to extract maximum value from all their data. But less than half of organizations that participated in the Quocirca study (44 percent), have implemented policies to manage both paper and digital information.
The Benefits of Paperless
Data chaos is most rampant at the threshold between physical and digital documents and as such, effective document capture, via a combination of scanners, software and services, is vital.
The Quocirca study points to the fact that effective capture is key to the integration of paper and digital documents to deliver faster access to business information, bring improved productivity and enable faster decision-making. The study found that the three key drivers for information capture are improved searchability (38 percent), reduced physical storage (26 percent) and improved shareability (34 percent).
Cross the finish line
In today’s DX economy, paper-based processes, disconnected information silos, and slow access to information are holding businesses back. Digital transformation is the key to increased productivity, greater business insights, accelerated growth and a sustainable competitive edge.
In an increasingly digital world, organizations are facing entirely new Enterprise Content Management (ECM), information management and data challenges. Even so, it’s easy to forget that many still sit on mountains of paper that need to be digitized and turned into actionable information. Extracting data from paper-based documents and integrating it into electronic workflows, enables organizations to remove manual data entry tasks and time from business processes.
While data chaos can lead to complexity and lost productivity in the workplaces, it does however present an opportunity for organizations to improve their processes, resulting in the frictionless flow of information, simplified workflows and more reliable data. As more organizations implement digital transformation strategies, taking their old fashioned paper-based workflows digital, they are reaping the benefit of an improved ROI and increased customer satisfaction.
Beat the complexity
62 percent of businesses polled by Quocirca said that complexity is the top barrier to deploying document capture technology. The Kodak Alaris IN2 Ecosystem has been designed to take the complexity out of information capture. This powerful combination of best-in-class scanners, software, services and partnerships, helps organizations seamlessly extract information from documents to increase productivity, enhance customer experiences and ultimately drive revenue growth.
The Kodak Alaris IN2 Ecosystems’ unique approach delivers the right fit with seamless integration into customer environments, the right experience that simplifies information capture, and the right results that deliver superior business value and higher ROI.
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