Here’s yet another important reason for converting your paper documents to digital imaged documents: the global pandemic. Whether you have switched to a hybrid office, or your business is classified as essential, your staff is touching paper documents every day. Those documents can be a transmission point, not just for the coronavirus, but for a host of other infectious agents as well.
The National Institutes of Health, UCLA, and Princeton University tested the longevity of covid-19 on various surfaces. They found that, in general, the smoother the surface, the longer the virus could live. Cardboard, rough and uncoated, was less likely to transmit the virus. Other forms of paper – smooth, coated printer paper of the type used in many business operations – provide a somewhat friendlier surface for the virus. The science is far from conclusive, and research is ongoing, but any reduction in risk is beneficial to everyone.
Paper is a high-touch element in any business. A few examples:
- Order forms– touched by the sales rep, the customer, the sales manager, the order filler, the file clerk
- Patient forms– touched by the desk personnel, the patient, the nurse, the physician, the lab, the accounting clerk, the file clerk
- Sales brochures– touched by the marketing coordinator, the sales rep, the customer, and (in the case of displayed brochures) the general public
It’s easy to see how viruses and bacteria can get passed around on paper, despite having all the recommended contagion measures in place. But when a document is imaged, it’s removed from the touch chain, and from the chain of potential contagion.
And in addition to breaking the contagion chain, you get all the other benefits of digitization, too. Imaged documents are readily accessible via electronic devices, speeding the flow of information. They are secure from loss, accidental damage, and unauthorized access. And they take up a fraction of the space of paper documents, reducing your storage footprint and your real estate costs.
We have advocated touchless technology for quite a while, not just for health reasons but for cost efficiency and for connectedness to the IoT. Digitization your paper documents is part of the wave of touchless tech that does more than just improve your business operations. It’s a risk management tool, keeping your staff and your community safer during and after the pandemic.
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Paper documents are a part of every business – legal contracts, titles, licenses, healthcare data, HR records, and many more, depending on the type of business you’re in. Your offices probably have multiple layers of security protecting those important documents. Maybe you have biometric locks on your file cabinets to prevent unauthorized access. Maybe your documents have RFID tags so their whereabouts are tracked throughout the office. Anyone needing to work with your organization’s secure documents has to be properly authorized.
But what happens to document security when your business operations pivot to working from home?
Thousands of organizations shifted to WFH (work from home) at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. For some, the unplanned move to WFH is proving to be economical and productive, and now they’re planning to continue WFH more or less indefinitely.
Others, however, are finding their WFH business operations are severely impeded due to their reliance on paper documents. Productivity plummets when remote workers need to access documents stored in an office they can’t enter, either because of their own health risk or because the office is closed.
Even if critical documents are retrieved and distributed to WFH staff, it’s difficult to maintain document integrity and chain-of-custody. Families are isolating together, and accidents happen, even with the best intentions. Neither clients nor insurers look favorably upon businesses that place confidential documents in an insecure setting.
There are regulatory considerations, too. Certain types of documents cannot be taken out of a secure office setting without running the risk of fines and lawsuits. And those fines can be hefty; the first two HIPAA fines imposed on hospitals totaled $5.3 million.
Document digitization is the solution. Converting your sensitive documents into digital form gives WFH teams remote access to the information contained in the documents, without any of the risks of taking paper documents out of a secure environment. Confidential information remains confidential.
Document digitization reduces the risk of paper in another way, too. In the event of fire or natural disasters, the imaged versions of your documents act as a back-up for the destroyed or missing paper documents. If you’re requesting a duplicate permit from a government agency, for example, having a digital image of the old permit can speed the process along.
Like RFID document tracking and controlled-access file cabinets, document digitization adds another level of security to your business. For WFH operations, document digitization keeps productivity high and risk low.
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Now that businesses are cautiously reopening, RFID is being deployed in the form of wearables that help employees maintain social distancing and stay safe in reopened workplaces.
In the U.S. and Europe, RFID suppliers are creating bracelets and smart watches with embedded RFID chips that alert users when they are too close to one another. Ford Motor Company, for example, has been testing an RFID wearable in the factories where it produces ventilators and respirators. Workers wear an RFID-enabled smart watch that vibrates and issues a color-coded warning whenever they move too near.
The watches also send social-distancing data to supervisors so they can modify workflows for better distancing. Further, the data provides supervisors with workplace contact tracing. If an employee becomes infected, other employees who have been in contact with that person can be identified for testing.
A spokesman for Italian RFID tech company Engineering points out that RFID’s proximity and contract tracing technology lets businesses isolate only the infected workers and their contacts, rather than all the employees. If only a small percentage of employees have to be pulled off the line, production can continue with little or no interruption.
Employees at many companies are teleworking to reduce their risk of infection. But even when telework is enabled by document digitization and digital asset management, it isn’t practical for every type of enterprise. Manufacturing, scientific research, logistics – these all require workers to be in the same place at the same time. The “new normal” is going to call for new ways of doing business and new applications of existing technology.
RFID is a mature, robust technology, a proven risk reduction tool for asset management and security. This same technology can be applied to a different kind of business risk: an infected workplace. RFID is easy to adapt for the socially-distanced workplace. As RFID is protecting your staff, it’s also protecting your business from additional production slowdowns. RFID is part of the solution for a safer workplace during reopening, and into the future.
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The just-in-time (JIT) inventory strategy has been the darling of manufacturers, distributors, and retailers for 20+ years. But there’s an inherent danger for retailers who use JIT.
JIT is at the heart of the nimble business model, allowing businesses to be flexible and responsive to new market conditions. It reduces investment in inventory, it reduces inventory obsolescence, and it reduces inventory storage needs – major benefits to retailers whose margins are squeezed every day. So what’s the downside?
Communication and speed are the vital components of successful JIT. The JIT cycle begins with a “pull” event. A pull event can be an alert that stored inventory has reached a pre-set level of depletion, or it can be something as simple as a single sale. The pull event triggers a message that more product is required in order to maintain a retailer’s inventory at the optimal level.
The message may initiate more production or it may request a transfer of inventory from warehouse to store. When the pull event message is triggered, manufacturing and logistics must move swiftly to deliver fresh inventory.
As long as the pull event message is received, and the inventory can be re-filled quickly, JIT is an undeniable winner. Retailers get all the benefits of low inventory costs. But if there’s a breakdown at any point – an unforeseen surge in demand, a communications delay, a diverted shipment – retailers are left with empty shelves and lost sales.
Every retail operation has a sweet spot that balances the cost of warehousing inventory against the risks of a JIT breakdown. Retail is a gamble in itself, but you can hedge your JIT bets by using automated vertical storage. These space-efficient vertical carousels can increase storage capacity by 50%, allowing a risk-averse retailer to keep an inventory cushion on hand for unanticipated demands, without the additional cost of extra storage space. For those retailers who are comfortable gambling with somewhat lower inventory on hand, a vertical storage system can reduce their storage footprints by as much as 75%, yielding a substantial financial cushion to offset potential JIT breakdowns.
JIT is a well-tested and well-proven strategy for managing inventory efficiently, productively, and profitably – as long as the system works smoothly and speedily. Mitigate the JIT risks with a vertical storage system, and you can bet safely on JIT.
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New York’s hotels became the target of negative press and unwanted legislative attention after the notorious 2011 assault on a hotel employee by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund. Despite the questionable outcome of that case, hotels in the Big Apple, Toronto, and other major cities wised up to the fact that their employees risk assault from irate, predatory, or unbalanced customers, and security cameras can’t cover every inch of a facility.
With costly employee assault claims on the rise, a number of New York hotels have turned to an RFID solution: a medic-alert type of emergency pendant that alerts hotel security and identifies the employee’s location. Some systems are tied in to security cameras, allowing security personnel to instantly view the cameras closest to the emergency site. A recent story in RFID Journal discusses the trend.
Other industries such as mining and healthcare are beginning to adopt RFID emergency locators, with the enthusiastic support of risk managers and legal advisors. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention…
Can your business benefit from an RFID risk reduction program?
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