Defeating the Paper Monster
Information is crucial to your organisational. It sits at the centre of all your operations and processes. However, information in a hard-copy format takes extra effort to keep safe and secure.
When it comes to information and document management, taming the paper-monster is quickly becoming an essential task for every organisation to tackle. Despite the accelerated movement to digital transformation, most organisations still deal with a lot of paper every day in the form of documents, forms, invoices, notes and many more. So, with essential documents coming every day in hard copy, how can you fight the paper monster?
Poor paper handling affects your ability to be efficient and, even worse, competitive. It can seem overwhelming, so, where do you begin? Even with your employees’ best intentions, daily distractions and inexperience can make it harder to achieve an effective policy on your own. Start by looking at some of the steps that most businesses would need to address. If it appears to be more time consuming that one would prefer, consider reaching out to an expert to get their advice and/or guidance.
- Try to reduce the volume coming in. By moving processes to online-only, all you have to deal with is the leftover paper. This means taking your inbound mail channel and taking a digital mailroom approach to capture everything as it comes in. Once captured, you can automatically capture information from that paperwork and feed your internal systems without the need for an individual to transcribe. This can all happen without the paper ever actually entering your office.
- Start classifying. Work out what paperwork you have and need to keep. Once that task is complete, start looking at where best to place it. A substantial part of the paper problem is the ad-hoc nature that prevents it from being classified and located in a consistent place. Classifying your paperwork allows you to start taking action.
- Get rid of it. If you’re keeping it, consider digitising it and moving the original off-site. If not? Securely destroy the remaining paper documents via a professional paper destruction service provider.
- Don’t expect your employees to fix it all. Asking your team members to control your information management processes is a little like asking the paper monster to eradicate itself. As your employees are part of the process, more success has been shown when an entirely new process is implemented.
- Make it accessible. You will need a consistent place to retrieve information so your employees can use it effectively on a day-to-day basis. Ideally, you can implement a document management platform that will allow you to manage your documents and build the document-centric workflows in.
How can it effect your business?
Now, for the great news… By making these changes you’re bound to see some improvements.
Efficiency
Better use of your information, less duplication, confusion and data recreation. Team members can spend more time on their work at hand and your company can locate the information they need, when they need it.
Costs
Reduction of cost is important (you don’t need to be told that) and although there are immediate cost savings on paper, other benefits are connected to core processes being executed more efficiently, better customer retention and if you’ve outsourced, reduced internal costs.
Risk
Knowing where your information is and trusting that it’s managed can be one of the significant advantages of moving to a well-managed information management solution.
So, now it’s time to ask yourself, how big have you let your paper monster grow? It may just be time for you to reach out to an expert to help you tame that monster.
If you would like ZircoDATA to help, simply get in touch with the ‘paper monster busters’ by contacting our friendly Client Care team via services@zircodata.com.au or 13 ZIRCO (13 94 72). Already a client, contact your Account Manager directly.
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