By Kyle Overall, Systems Engineer
Going green is a title many organizations strive for, and admittedly, this is somewhat of a trend – i.e. organizations that sing The Recycle Song but print 20-page documents for every person that attends a meeting. Not very environmental-friendly, is it? For banks and insurers though, this is more than just a title bandwagon to hop on. There is significant business value in going green or even becoming a complete paperless company.
If an organization or business is “paperless,” it means they took it a step further beyond avoiding the printer and chose to implement a technology that digitizes and automates processes. When you go paperless with intelligent automation, here are nine things it can do for your business process — beyond saving money on paper of course:
9 Ways Going Paperless Pays Off
- Multiple people can work on documents.
More than one person at-a-time can work on or from the same document without having to print or create duplicate copies.
- Changes can be tracked easily.
Track who makes changes on any document or even who views a document so an audit goes smoothly.
- Documents can be kept more securely than ever before.
Set security on documents so only specific pre-defined security groups can access them (whereas anyone can look in a file cabinet).
- Errors and manual labor are reduced.
Reduce manual labor and input errors with an optical character reader (OCR). An OCR captures all data from a document and populates it in the appropriate fields instead of having to type it in.
- Utilizing a content management system means documents are easier to view.
User-friendly interfaces make searching, retrieving, and viewing documents an efficient task.
- You’re able to search within your content.
Designated search criteria store and maintain content consistently. For example, if one user searches for a document by first name, last name but it’s saved under last name, first name, they’ll have trouble finding it. A research study by AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management), a non-profit market research organization, cites improved search-ability and share-ability of business documents as the biggest driver for scanning and capture technology.
- Less user error.
Reduce risk of user input error by combining technologies such as OCR and artificial intelligence.
- Disputes are resolved faster than ever.
Quickly view, track, and resolve any correspondence that may be in dispute.
- You get a ROI — quickly.
The return on investment pays off within months and sometimes even weeks because of cost savings in labor, storage, and printing. Fifty-nine percent of organizations achieve a payback in less than 12 months from their paper-free projects.
Adopting a content management system like IBM Content Navigator or IBM Case Manager is one step in the right direction to go paperless. Additional features like bookmarking (bookmark pages to quickly find later), tagging (tag documents to describe the purpose and location) and split and merge (reassemble, split, merge and correct documents within the systems), take productivity to the next level and will help you go the extra mile.
Want to learn more?
One of our case studies describes how a current client — Union Bank — went from shipping paper documents to a mailroom that sorted and sent the documents back in an average of three days, to automating their process and doing the same thing in three minutes.