Paper vs. Digital: 6 Areas in your company that can be improved by digital transformation
4.3 hours a week.
That’s the amount of time the average person wastes in paperworks. Let’s say you have five employees, that means that your company just wasted 21.5 working hours spread across your whole workforce.
What if you have 100, 200, 1000 employees?
It might seem trivial at first, but according to reliableplant.com, paper clutter is the number one problem for most businesses. Not only does it eat a lot of time but it also causes stress and frustration in the workplace, which in turn produces inefficiency in a lot of areas from production, communication, collaboration, and overall business operations.
Managing Assets
There’s always paper involved in acquiring assets. It doesn’t matter if it’s the CEO who buys it or the managers: there would always be stacks of paper from purchasing to on-boarding.
Every enterprise has policies about who can purchase at what level and what approvals that person needs. Manual purchasing for example causes discrepancies along the way (from acquisition to on-boarding). Digital solves this providing options for buying that allows users to buy through digital means complete with customer service that nothing of the past operations can compare to.
Digital even allows effective implementation of policies from who can purchase at what level to who gets the approval for certain purchases. These processes can be automated with the right tools and helps in keeping tabs on the whole business operation.
People Empowerment
At its core, digital transformation is about people empowerment. From the first day at an enterprise, a new employee’s onboarding process requires a lot of paper. Filling out different forms and processing the basic requirements, all of them requires paper and eats a lot of time just from processing.
Digital solves this by streamlining the common processes of employee requirements. Health insurances, tax returns, policies, deposit slips, everything. They can all be rolled out digitally with the help of tools like document management systems and enterprise IT solutions.
Content Workflow
Creating content is one part, getting approval is the other. Commonly, getting approval is a one-way process of submitting the paper report and then getting the approval the next day. This eats a lot of time and a lot of time between content creation kills the content.
Paper-based processes are linear. Content gets passed from one reviewer to another following a systematized chain. Digital keeps the ideas fresh by delivering the content to the people who will review it efficiently.
In a digitally empowered business, all it takes is an efficient email solution to fully harness content production coupled with a highly efficient document management system. Gone are the days when drafts are submitted via folders and are schedule for review the next day. In the age of digital transformation, all it takes is a few clicks to fully review the content and tweak it to fit the demands of the market. Perfect for the highly volatile market we have now.
Security
Let’s face it. Digital is secure.
Solutions do not only offer a streamlined process of business operation but it also wields the power of the cloud (like Microsoft’s Azure). With the cloud, your file is backed up by a multitude of copies separated across Microsoft Certified servers.
Think of any calamity that might hit your business and DX can guarantee that your company’s most important files are still there.
Yes, even after an apocalypse. Trust us.
Finance
If you ask anyone what they think is the most paper infested place on the office, finance is probably in the top five if not the top one.
By now we know what DX (Digital Transformation) is allergic to: time-consumption and auditing is a time-consuming process… You know the drill.
Remove this burden from your business operations and see your productivity charts skyrocket. Finance is the lifeblood of a company. Documents related to payroll, assets and liabilities, financial statements, proof of purchase, and on-boarding can now be automated through digital means.
Business Operations
The idea of DX started from a simple question:
“What if I can do this with a computer?”
Word processing, business operations, customer engagement and feedback, production, acquisition, even up to liquidation. Digital Transformation revolutionizes every aspect of your business operations.
By going digital, it will streamline business operations that require inputs such as forms and documents required to get things done.
Three Easy Steps on how to jump from paper to digital
- Look at your operations and identify which part drives costs. Look at the tiniest details and try to digitize it first. It will serve as a quick solution as well as testing grounds for new processes before you roll it out to the whole company. Example: document archiving, approvals, content flow, etc.
- Document everything. Plan the steps ahead as well as who is involved in the whole digitization process. Give key persons a heads-up, or even better, a workshop. On-boarding and early adaptation are keys toward full digital transformation.
- Segment the digitization process in segments and look for those easy wins. Do workshops tailored for each department, look closely how the new process is affecting each department, ask for feedbacks from employees, and look closely at the stats and what makes them go up or down. Don’t try to do everything at once.
Digital transformation is hard and paper is standing in your way, but with the right tools and the right guidance, it’s not impossible to overcome.
Papers, they are your roadblocks. Digitize them and start your transformation.