How navigable is your paper trail right now? How well is it aligned with your overall business objectives? It may be time to identify both current inefficiencies and explore cost-effective, fully secure practices moving forward.
Have you ever followed your own paper trail? Where does it lead you?
Regardless of the size of your organization – a small work group up to a large enterprise - it has a unique paper trail based on your existing technology and individual departmental practices. Your routine document workflow, files and paper moving from desk to desk both manually and digitally, dictate the route of your trail. Your path can often be cluttered by manual, paper based processing, damaged by inadequate security measures or completely overgrown from simple negligence.
How navigable is your paper trail right now? How well is it aligned with your overall business objectives? It may be time to identify both current inefficiencies and explore cost-effective, fully secure practices moving forward.
Are you ready to become a paper trail blazer?
Manual, paper-based processing can be downright costly and time consuming. It takes approximately 25 hours to recreate a lost document, according to the BakerHostetler Data Security Incident Response Report. Additionally, the cost to recreate a document is approximately $220, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers.
Organizations today are under increasing pressure to simultaneously reduce costs, increase productivity and enhance security. Blazing a new trail immediately addresses these three pressure points businesses today face.
Creating a well-groomed, easily traversed trail is a unique process and mapped route for every organization, often striking a balance between paper and digital files moving from desk to desk to an ultimate destination. But once completed, you’ll discover positive impacts on your employees, your clients and, ultimately, your bottom line.
Three Markers to Watch for in Blazing Your Paper Trail:
1. Document Workflow
Document workflow, at its core, is the path your documents and files travel toward a destination. Specific, robust solutions enable companies to make productive use of business-critical information, using software to put an end to the paper shuffle. These allow organizations to:
- Automate document-driven work processes
- Employ efficient, flexible, and secure rules-based routing and monitoring
- Improve productivity and accountability with automatic notifications
- Distribute documents evenly among team members with workload balancing.
A Document Management solution fully digitizes your paper shuffle into a structured, easily accessible environment. The central objective of utilizing Document Management is to make your overall business processes more efficient, and specifically to accelerate and properly secure the way you move documents across your office.
2. Document Image/Capture
Paper is still an everyday part of many organizations’ work environment. The method of capturing documents raises many questions: Who will do the scanning? Do you have enough paper to scan to consider a dedicated scanner – and how fast does it need to be? How easily are these scanned documents accessed and shared?
Document Capture/Imaging solutions can help companies cost-effectively:
- Minimize manual scanning and indexing by capturing specific pieces of information from paper and electronic document formats
- Automatically sort and categorize incoming documents, fill out fields and create folder paths based on image data, barcodes, page size, and more
- Rapidly drag-and-drop electronic files into document repositories for easy storage
- Refine image quality and apply enhancements to scanned documents
- Convert all incoming documents into full-text searchable assets for future search and retrieval
- Trigger document distribution workflows based on document processing activities
3. Document Security
Are the documents traveling across your office – and the sensitive information they contain – fully secure? Are you sure? What about the documents gathering dust on desktops, or sitting idly atop office equipment?
Your corporate intellectual property and the confidential information of your customers are your lifeline. With specific software-based solutions, you can protect documents from unauthorized access or release, redact confidential information, ensure long-term document preservation, and also automatically move documents to an offline archive once they are no longer needed.
Internally, these solutions can help create highly customized confidentiality rules, such as identifying work groups, granting permission rights to certain designated users, and even setting up rights on what certain users can do – or not do - with those documents.
Ready to blaze a new, more productive path for your documents? Let's visit! Our trailblazers (a.k.a. Account Representatives) will be happy to grab their gear and begin exploring how to make your workflow more efficient and your people more productive.
