Digitize Your Paper Office

In general life, more and more aspects of day to day routine are made easier by computers and the internet, and the modern business is no exception. From Excel macros to email threads, computation and connectivity enable and inform almost all major business decisions made today.

And while iconic scenes like the destruction of an errant copier in the cult classic film Office Space speak to the periodic frustrations of an increasingly digitized workplace, the trend of digital over physical is only picking up steam.

The motivations for digitization of business records are myriad, compelling, and well-documented - both on paper and otherwise. “Going digital” as a business allows employees to share and search documents easily from the office or home, blurring the boundaries of the traditional office but encouraging greater flexibility and accountability. And on an even more basic level, storing documents in a central database not only saves trees but also saves space in the office and space in the annual budget for recurring costs other than ink cartridges and printers that may ultimately infuriate more than print.

There are other more subtle savings associated with digitizing business records that may not be immediately apparent but always show up in a better bottom line.

The customer who returns with a larger order because he feels well served by a substantially faster response time from service representatives who don’t have to sift through boxes of files to locate old account records.

The employee who stays with the company for a decade or more because he/she isn’t having to sort those records by hand for hours on end.

The tens of thousands of customers whose data wasn’t compromised because it was stored in a database with secure access through usernames and passwords... rather than in a warehouse in cardboard boxes, kept safe by a single padlock.

And so on.

Despite the undeniable cost and time savings ultimately associated with digitization for the vast majority of businesses, the actual process of translating paper assets to digital form can prove incredibly daunting. Especially for legacy paper-based businesses with years or decades worth of (ever accumulating) raw data, even only scanning documents would require thousands of man hours - BEFORE providing a meaningful organizational mechanism for storage and access by employees.

Thankfully, enterprise content management (ECM) providers can alleviate all of the pain points associated with the process. Records can be digitized and indexed en masse via optical character recognition (OCR) technology for easy search and retrieval - off site or on premises, depending on your security needs.

Documents which must be maintained in physical paper form are easier to manage and access through bar code identification. Your business will likely save money thanks to economies of scale involved in storing the boxes of paper in a dedicated warehouse, and your customers will rest easier knowing any paper data pertaining to their accounts is secure at a facility designed to house it.

Furthermore, if you want to ensure your business fully complies with minimum document retention regulations, many Records Management Partners will automatically destroy documents past their required retention date, saving you the hassle and potential liability.

When you do go digital… shred those digitized paper files once the retention period is met to minimize your exposure. And if your Records Management Partner is a good global citizen, you can even help the environment by recycling your securely destroyed sensitive information.