Do the back-office operations of your business still involve piles of paper? If so, there are easy and low-cost ways to replace document disasters with digital files and processes. Digital content and processes can transform your business to make your work so much faster, easier and better for your bottom line. We call this Intelligent Information Management (IIM), and it can benefit you and your staff with new opportunities to enhance your productivity, no matter what size your business may be.
Consider these paper-based processes, and the time it takes just to find information on a paper document. In addition, paper files, filing cabinets and storage boxes take up valuable space in the office, and may even require offsite storage. Leveraging the information contained on paper documents involves a lot of time to enter manually, leading to potential errors and fewer opportunities to integrate specific information into your line-of-business applications. Another important consideration? Security for your business and your customers, because leaving paperwork out in your office opens you up to risk, especially if only specific people are permitted to see privileged or private information.
Conversely, if you and some of your staff are still working from home, you probably know that it hasn’t always been easy accessing the information you need. Even if you’re in the office, the data/information/document may not be easily accessible, which further slows everyone down.
Business transformation begins with digitization
When a process is paper-based, it simply can’t be as automated as it could be if it were digital. Working with paper means less time serving your customers, paying staff to accomplish relatively low-ranking tasks, and even paying overtime because tedious paper-based processes take so much time to complete. But there are easy and low-cost investments that can make a big difference to your productivity – and your profitability.
True productivity comes from organization and the efficient processes you have in place. With today’s technology around documents, processes and the data your business is built on, IIM can help your business become its digital best, no matter where you might be in your journey toward digital transformation (DX).
A digital transformation includes scanning the paper that’s stored in files, boxes and filing cabinets. Scanning records and indexing information for searching purposes gives you the digital accessibility you need, whether it’s for historical files or the documents you refer to each day.
Digital documents can be retrieved with a few simple keystrokes, and allow for automation on critical processes including approvals, routing, renaming, sorting, sharing, filing, retrieving and more. Best of all, your digital content is accessible from one central location, allowing you and your staff to stay connected, whether you’re working onsite or remotely
By establishing a digitization strategy and digital processes, you can enjoy quick access to data along with the safe storage of your business information. Without these basics, you simply can’t take DX to the next level. For processes that must still be paper-based, leveraging software can minimize manual data entry and possibly route the document into a workflow based on a predetermined logic.
How key IIM technologies can benefit your business
At Konica Minolta, we specialize in helping small and medium-size businesses (SMB) in their DX journey to make their work faster, more efficient and better protected in all these ways:
Business Process Improvement – Organization is the foundation of efficiency, and this step involves mapping your processes to understand how things actually work. By establishing visibility and control of your workflow (including all the gaps and bottlenecks), we can show you where your processes can be improved to save you time and money.
Content Management – Our experts can help you organize, optimize and manage digital documents throughout your organization so that you and your staff can find the information you need, when you need it.
Case Management – With digitized documents and systems, you can hand lean entire case, from customer inquiries to fraud investigations to incidents involving Human Resources, on one reliable platform. This gives your team the visibility to all the relevant documentation and data they need.
Intelligent Automation – For larger SMBs, dynamic workflows enabled by intelligent automation give you the tools to classify and extract key information you need to make decisions. This type of automation can also help you quickly resolve exceptions and acquire approvals to get your business on the fast track.
Business Process Outsourcing/Scanning – More than simply alleviating your employees’ frustration with rummaging through files to find documents, digitizing your records versus storing them on-or offsite means you can reduce physical storage space and preserve important documents and data before they are damaged or misplaced. There are many scenarios that can damage paper files and prevent them from being scanned. As we all know, accidents can happen – pipes can burst, sprinklers go off, basements flood – all of which can lead to ruined documents.
Plus, it’s not just your work processes that matter when it comes to piles of paper. Another factor to consider when you rely on paper processed is the waste that’s generated each day. The recycling company Roadrunner reports that the average office worker uses about two pounds of paper and paperboard each day, and roughly 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year. While we may not arrive at a paperless office anytime soon, the digital enhancements that minimize the paper trail and were previously only applicable to larger enterprises are now available to small and medium-size businesses.
That’s why more and more businesses are seeing the value of IIM to effectively manage their overflowing files. According to Accenture, 91 percent of employees can be more effective during the work-day, if their workspace were better organized. Deloitte has also found that 84 percent of organizations think that transforming their workforce experience can improve productivity.
IIM can help with your personnel challenges, too
It’s one thing to lose productivity from lost or misplaced documents, or to pay overtime so that staff can handle your back-office busywork. But in the current environment where so many employers are working short-handed, DX can be a time-saver and productivity booster to address the following:
Imagine how much more productive you and your staff could be with IIM. This business transformation offers so many benefits to today’s SMBs. Learn more about all the productivity challenges Konica Minolta can help you solve here.
