Going Paperless: ECM Solutions for SMBs

When you think of paperless Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, you may automatically picture a huge organization with crazy amounts of paper and information. While this scenario is true and ECM solutions do handle those big paper problems well, there also are powerful solutions for small to medium businesses (SMB).

The thought of going paperless can seem like an overwhelming task for the SMB sector. You may think that you don’t have enough paper documents or information to need an ECM solution. Or, you may struggle with information overload and massive amounts of paper. Small to mid-size businesses have their challenges, too, when it comes to managing their business information.

It’s all about setting your business up for success and enabling future growth. Setting the infrastructure in place while your business is smaller will increase the workflow and efficiency of how it operates and will end up lowering your costs and improving your bottom line.

3 benefits of an ECM solution:

1. Lower Costs – The bottom line is the focal point of every business. You want to have low costs and high profits. For smaller businesses, paper, ink, storage, filing, printing, and other similar costs all can add up quickly and be a major factor in your operating costs. With a paperless ECM solution, these costs will drastically decrease and, in some cases, disappear while saving you time and headaches.
2. Increase Productivity – The more paper in your processes, the slower and more error-prone your processes are. The issue with paper is that it has to be handled physically and moved around. This takes time, human interaction, and costs your business more money. You need to introduce workflows into your processes that replace the manual paper shuffling and filing in order to increase your productivity. You will be able to do more with a lot fewer resources. Free up your employees to spend their time on more value-added tasks and on customer service.
3. Enable Growth – The amazing thing about a paperless solution like ECM is that is has a very high ROI. Most businesses realize their ECM investment within the first 12-18 months and, after that, it’s all cost savings. The money you will be saving can be put into other areas of your business that will help you improve and grow. Provide your customers with the best possible product or service that you can, isn’t that the whole point of your business?

Additional Benefits of going paperless with ECM:

• Eliminate paper-based filing systems
• Streamline business processes
• Automate document routing and notifications
• Increase document security and compliance
• Easily share and collaborate on documents

For document-intensive companies looking to challenge the definition of business efficiency, Konica Minolta’s ECM solutions can provide the unique tools that greatly enhance business process performance. These solutions offer a comprehensive feature set that includes every capability that companies are likely to need, along with customizable options for organizations with specialized requirements.

The world that our businesses operate in is ever changing and we need to make sure that we set ourselves up for success. No longer cost prohibitive, today’s ECM solutions are lighter, more agile and flexible so organizations can tune these solutions to target specific business operations and problems. Starting in the areas that are the most paper-heavy and time consuming is a step in the right direction.

Join us Nov. 16 to learn how to overcome manual processes in accounts payable with the webinar “How SMBs are Overcoming AP Operation Challenges.” Plus, join our SMB conversation on social media with #Workflow4SMB.

Also, we sponsored the recent AIIM focus article “SMB: Everything You Need to Know About ECM.” This brief but detailed write-up will give you insights on some of today’s trends and suggestions to prepare your organization to implement an ECM solution.