Why Document Management Matters: Three Ways Paper is Destroying Your Productivity

Paper is a giant, expensive wrecking ball destroying your ability to work effectively each and every day. Your approval processes are getting held up. You’re getting charged late fees or missing early pay discounts. And worst of all, you’re spending a ton of money on paper, storage space, filing supplies, and routing fees to fuel this system that just isn’t working.

Let’s break it down and look at just three of the ways paper is hurting your efficiency and talk about how going paperless can help.

The Filing Problem

Many different kinds of documents are created or delivered to your organization. In each one’s lifecycle, it will be sorted, filed, pulled, copied, and re-filed many times. If you think about how many of your employees are involved in filing documents for any department in your organization and add up the time each one of them is spending, you’ll get a pretty good idea of how much time is being wasted.

A paperless solution can automatically capture and store documents as they’re created or brought into the organization. Once they’re stored in the repository, you don’t need to re-file documents each time they’re reviewed like you would with paper documents.

The Searching Problem

Finding documents when you need them is another issue with a paper filing system. If a customer or vendor called with a question on an order, you would have to walk down to a filing cabinet to retrieve it. Anyone used to searching through files knows there are many places it can hide that are NOT in the cabinet where it should be. It might be sitting on your AP manager’s desk waiting for approval, or in an ever-growing to-be-filed basket somewhere. Sometimes that document you need has actually been misfiled and potentially lost forever.

When stored electronically, a document can be immediately accessed from a user’s desktop (assuming they have the appropriate security privileges.) A powerful search engine means finding documents and drilling down to related documents happens in a moment’s notice.

The Workflow Problem

Another downside to paper is that it can only be in one place at a time. That means a document in a remote office cannot be accessed by someone at corporate. And a document buried on someone’s desk cannot be processed by anyone else. If a document has multiple approval steps to go through and the only way that can happen is by walking or sending a document to each person in the process, that document approval is not going to happen quickly. Especially if someone is on vacation while the documents sits on their desk awaiting their return.

In a paperless office, anyone involved in the process can access the document wherever they are. Approvals can happen from anywhere as well – including through email or a mobile device. Plus alerts can be scheduled to notify employees if an approval deadline is approaching so nothing gets missed.

If you can relate to some of these challenges and paper is getting in the way of your productivity, we are here to help. Our team is equipped to walk through your business processes and offer the best possible solution to help you improve. For a better idea of how integrated document management works, ask us about DocLink by Altec.

Written by:
Christi Whipple, Channel Program Manager
Altec