subject: What Are The Advantages Of A Paperless Office? [print this page] What company would not want a paperless office or want to reduce the large amount of paper that they use? A paperless office also gives employees access to their electric documents. Ultimately, they save resources by reducing consumption, reduces office rent by saving space, protects intellectual property by organizing and securing and allows easy access to electronic documents.
Paperless office customers are reducing paper usage and taking advantage of document management technology, secure user rights, workflow, search and the ability to access documents from anywhere they can use the internet. There are a number of reasons the paperless office has become increasingly popular in recent years including:
- Save resources, which means reducing the company's consumption of paper: "A ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees."
- Reduce the cost of office rent by getting rid of filing cabinets, etc.: "Each four-drawer file cabinet takes up to 9 ft. of floor space."
- Protects Intellectual Property by securing and organizing it: "20 percent to 40 percent of a workers time can be wasted searching for documents."
- Easy-accessible information: "More than 70 percent of today's businesses would fail if they suffered a catastrophic loss of their paper documentation."
There are two approaches that your business can take if you are considering implementing a paperless office. The first will be referred to as taking the big plunge and the second will be referred to as dipping in a toe.
Taking the Big Plunge: The big plunge can be a relatively intimidating approach. This approach requires a big budget, resources and time. Implementing the paperless office all at once requires: lots of consultation and preparation with employees. It requires a strong, visible mandate from senior management. It requires a certifiable, formal process of employee training. It requires detailed documentation of the re-engineering processes. It will affect every corner of an organization. It most likely will be relatively expensive, require consultants and compress a lot of activity into a time frame that is rarely met. This project is all or nothing and resources will be consumed and money will be spent until implementation is complete.
Dipping in a Toe: Starting a paper-free office at the departmental level is a practical and low risk approach. Commonly it is the departments themselves that recognize their problem and are looking for a solution. The risk and cost of a departmental paperless office solution is not too high and if it never expands beyond the specific department it can be easily justified. If this department succeeds the solution can be expanded to include other departments. New departments implementing a paperless office can learn from the test departments successes and errors. Taking the dip in a toe approach allows your company to gradually shift to a paperless office and allows a company to become comfortable with the process without being fully entrenched.
Every business want to find a way to reduce paper usage, encourage keeping and sharing their documents in compliance. Document management software has broken the paradigm of the paperless office being expensive, complicated and hard to use. With a relatively small investment and in a short amount of time a departmental solution can be running and setting a model for the rest of your organization.
