The more times a document is touched, the greater the loss of productivity.
In our personal lives, paper is usually a passive form of information media. Paper documents such as wills, deeds, and birth certificates are carefully filed and only rarely accessed. Productivity isn’t really a consideration.
But in business, paper documents operate differently. Paper is a highly active medium in any paper-reliant organization, going in and out of file cabinets, across desks, through many hands.
Paper-based processes kill productivity in three ways:
- Movement – Inputting information by hand (a form, for example), and walking a document from one place to another (an approval process , for example), all happen at human speed. And if the recipient isn’t present to immediately handle the document, or the document travels via the USPS or another carrier, the process becomes even slower.
- Loss – DeLoitte & Touche have calculated that the average U.S. manager spends 3 hours per week looking for lost documents. That’s roughly 150 hours per year, per person, in lost productivity.
- Security – It is estimated that 70% of businesses would fail within 3 weeks in the event of a catastrophic loss of paper records due to fire or flood.
The explosive growth in work-from-home (WFH) adds a fourth productivity challenge. WFH staffers need access to papers locked away in the office. When staffers travel to the office, the commute time translates to lost productivity. And when documents are taken out of the office, there’s an increased security risk. 61% of data breaches in small businesses involve paper. Productivity plummets while damage is assessed and repaired.
The solution to paper’s productivity-killing tendencies is digital:
- Digitization (document conversion) of paper documents creates secure, accessible, searchable digital documents. Instead of moving at human speed from one desk to another, imaged documents move at near-instantaneous internet speeds. Imaged documents never get lost under a bookshelf or left in the copier. Usage authorization is managed and monitored for improved security, giving remote workers the access they need to be productive.
- Enterprise content management (ECM) software helps businesses move many of their paper-based processes to a digital format. Documents originate digitally, and remain in that medium throughout all operational processes. Errors are reduced, and, like imaged documents, these digital-origin documents move quickly and safely through the pipeline.
Even when businesses convert to ECM, however, paper is still generated. Signatures may be added, hand-written revisions can be made, notes may be added. An digitization program works alongside an ECM system to preserve a record of those document outputs, in digital format. Can your business gain efficiency and productivity by going digital? If you have paper-based processes, the answer is Yes.
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Lean management’s goal of continuous improvement is reliant upon optimal information flow. In other words, you’ve got to get the right information to the right people at the right time if you want to improve. If you’re managing an operation that keeps much of its information on paper, you might be struggling with the right people/right time/right information intersection.
A major part of the lean management philosophy is the elimination of waste, including excess wait time, excess motion, excess inventory, and overproduction. Paper documents, and the information they contain, can take time to locate (excess wait time). They generally aren’t ready to hand, and require extra physical effort to use (excess motion). And because of paper’s excess wait time and motion, people tend to generate extra copies (overproduction) which then become a storage problem, a security problem, or a sustainability problem.
Document digitization – converting paper documents to digital documents – streamlines the flow of information. Digital documents are organized into a file structure that can be searched with electronic speed. They can be accessed instantly with the touch of a screen or a keyboard. When everyone who needs the information can easily access the centrally-controlled digital documents, there’s no pressure to make multiple copies. With document digitization, there’s no more excess wait time, excess motion, or excess production.
Paper’s inherent properties run counter to the lean management philosophy. Digitization of paper documents supports lean management by reducing waste. Learn more about digitization, and get lean.
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If you work in logistics, you know all about the piles of paperwork that accumulate with any shipment. And with all that paper come the inevitable slowdowns when a document is missing or damaged, and has to be re-created. Supply chain slowdowns are a hot topic, and paperwork is part of the problem.
According to an analysis by IBM and shipping giant Maersk, nearly 200 documents were generated for a single shipment of flowers from Kenya to the Netherlands. Each document – bills of lading, Statements of Fact, and an array of certificates – represents a potential bottleneck in the smooth flow of shipments. In an industry where timeliness matters (and really, are there any industries in which time isn’t of the essence?), paper documents are a threat to business.
Digitized documents are now beginning to reduce the mountain of paper that accompanies shipments. One test of logistics digitalization, including digitized documents, reduced the usual 2-week border clearance to one day – an extraordinary improvement.
The logistics sector isn’t the only one seizing the opportunity for more efficient paper management. Government agencies, healthcare, public safety, and the legal system are all benefiting from document digitization, or digitization – converting paper documents to digital ones. Digitization creates “smart documents:” a database of secure, searchable digital documents accessible from anywhere.
Digitization speeds up operations in two ways:
- The correct digital version of any paperwork can be located and retrieved with electronic speed. No more long delays spent digging through files or archives.
- A document’s digital version is securely stored. It doesn’t disappear under a desk, or get damaged by insects, or become illegible due to a spilled cup of coffee.
Digitization has other benefits besides operational speed and efficiency. It reduces the need for storage space, as it eliminates the needs for numerous filing cabinets. It is accessible from anywhere, whether an employee is on another floor in a building, or working from home. It cuts down on physical paper usage and the associated business and environmental costs.
But if time is critical to your business, document digitization is guaranteed to save time in retrieving documents, and in preserving documents safely for future use. With digitization, your ship will certainly come in.
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Paper has been getting a bad rap lately. There’s no denying that it’s not the most sustainable product. Paper manufacturing contributes to deforestation and pollutes water and air. Too much paper ends up in landfills where it produces methane, a greenhouse gas.
However, the availability of recycling has improved the green rating of paper. The U.S. EPA reports that over 2/3 of paper and paperboard were recycled in recent years. Today, much of the paper made for office use is manufactured from recycled paper.
And some of that recycled paper is the result of digitization. As part of the document conversion process, many paper documents are designated for disposal – secure disposal that protects sensitive data – and those properly disposed papers can be recycled.
Digitization offers numerous benefits: reduced storage space, improved security, remote access, and improved sustainability. Nevertheless, paper still serves a valuable purpose, as recent studies have shown.
Writing and printing paper, in particular, are surprisingly important. Writing by hand involves many parts of the brain and sensory system: tactile, spatial, and linguistic. That complexity helps fix the written word in the memory. One University of Tokyo study showed that students’ handwritten note-taking produced better recall an hour later. One example: If you’ve ever written a grocery list and left it at home, you probably found you could still remember a good number of the list’s items.
Books and paper documents, too, showed enhanced recall in comparison to digital documents. Often, book readers can recall the specific location on a page where an important fact was stated.
The takeaway:
- Information that needs to be remembered should be delivered on paper, and handwritten notes should be taken.
- Information that doesn’t need to be recalled in detail, but quickly and accurately searched and accessed as needed, is ideally stored in digital format.
Many, many business documents fit that latter description, which is one of the reasons digitization is a good business practice. As noted above, the benefits have a positive effect on your bottom line.
And now, if you want to remember what you’ve just read here, print it out and take some notes!
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We usually think of electronic files as the only medium to be targeted by hackers. Paper seems invulnerable to hacks. If the bad actors don’t have the paper documents, they don’t have the data. But is that really true?
Cyber attacks have been common occurrences. Many times, however, such hacks were preventable: Passwords were not protected, download and upload protocols were not observed, file-sharing rules weren’t enforced.
You may think paper-based data isn’t hackable. But if we define “hacking” as the theft of information, no matter the medium, paper documents have been hacked repeatedly, for many, many years. (Pentagon Papers, anyone?)
Now that employees are returning to the workplace, paper documents are once again reappearing on desks, in copiers, and in file folders. Those supposedly safe documents can be hacked in a number of ways. A few examples:
- A confidential document left in a copier tray
- A sensitive document tossed in the trash
- A password written on a sticky note and pasted to a computer
- A private report left in a conference room after a presentation
In each case, the information can easily make its way into the hands of people who shouldn’t have this sensitive data.
One way to make paper documents less hackable is to digitize them. Digitization converts a paper document’s information into electronic format, bringing it into the cyber world where new technology can keep it more secure. Digitization gives bad actors one less way to access information.
Document conversion simplifies data security because there is only one primary medium to secure. Security advocates recommend bringing paper documents into the purview of Chief Information Officers, who have traditionally focused on securing only electronic data. Digitizing paper documents makes them more manageable for CIO’s. With the reduction of paper-based information, there is only one door for criminals to get at sensitive information. And CIO’s can enforce strict data hygiene to protect that single door, and keep information safe.
Return-to-the-office, whether full time or hybrid, gives businesses an opportunity to reassess their information security. Now is the time to institute a digitization program and eliminate a significant security vulnerability.
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