Doing Digital: The Challenges of Converting Document Workflows
Despite today’s technological advancements, as much as 80% of business information is still paper-based. Digital workflows have a number of benefits, but many companies find the conversion process intimidating. Will the investment be worth it? How will it impact your business? Will it really improve customer service? The answer for most companies is “yes.”
The Benefits of Digital
Going digital has a variety of benefits for your company. These include:
- Improved reliability
- Improved efficiency
- Better collaboration
- Easier auditing
- Improved security and regulatory compliance
- Lowered costs
How can the transition affect all these areas of business? If you think of how much effort, time and cost goes into paper documents you can see that having to transmit all your data physically causes significant slow-downs. Paper documents are easy to lose, making searching a daunting and expensive process. By using digital workflows instead, you can more easily and efficiently move your data through, for better results.
How to Go Digital
It’s often not realistic for many businesses to go completely paper-free, but going digital and reducing your reliance on paper is still beneficial. As you go digital, the most efficient way is to convert paper documents to digital as close to their creation as possible, and then delivering them to the appropriate apps and people for processing. This eliminates paper from the equation until it reaches the end of its life cycle, when you may need to print invoices, customer summaries, or shipping data. Storing your data digitally allows you the greatest flexibility and security, while keeping your costs down.
Data Capture
Simply scanning a document is enough to make it a digital file, but, you’ll want to be able to capture the data from your documents. This can be done automatically via your scanner to create an editable and searchable file. From this file, relevant data can be extracted for use in your data management system. This simplifies the workflow, and gives you the best return on your investment.
Going digital may seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Not sure where to start? Give one of our team members a call and let us show you how migrating to digital workflows can improve productivity, streamline workflows, and reduce your costs.