I recently helped a mid-sized business that was growing quickly and starting to hit its stride.
The business was growing, the team was expanding, and the revenue was increasing.
But behind the scenes were the inevitable problems of physical paperwork.
Honestly, we rarely notice it until it becomes a problem.
The team had several filing cabinets and a dedicated room to store client records from years gone by.
But the real problem was the number of folders on managers’ desks, each containing the relevant paperwork for the day’s work.
I guess it’s easy to ignore the clutter until it starts pushing back.
Many small files, storage cabinets, rooms for old client records; all of this at first seems to be no problem.
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It isn’t until a company reaches the halfway point of its growth and has a large number of employees that managing the physical archive of documents suddenly becomes a major problem.
This invisible weight burdens the administration staff and hampers operations.
The Real Cost of Information Silos
Papers, whether physical or digital, are assets that are used to operate a business.
When these papers are spread out over various physical folders, the business is operating at a delay.
Each time a team member stops to search for papers to complete a task, time is lost.
On average, a team member loses about an hour of work per week searching for papers and information.
How much time does your team lose every week just hunting down data?
Think of the frustration that your clients will feel if they’re forced to wait hours or even days for you to find a file or contract that was previously stored in an off-site storage location.
You know that sinking feeling when a customer is waiting and the file is just gone.
In today’s fast-moving business environment, speed is a competitive advantage.
If your business relies on physical documentation, you’re at a disadvantage compared to others who use automated documentation and digital workflows.
The problem with physical documentation is that it creates information silos and, as a result, doesn’t lend itself to an agile business.
Papers can be in only one place at a time, and as a result, cross-functional teams cannot work simultaneously on the same documentation.
For example, the accounting team may have a file that the operations team needs to complete a task.
Still, because the file is in the accounting team’s possession, the operations team cannot access it at the same time.
The result is a lack of progress as the organization is unable to function as a united whole. It stalls progress.
Security, Risk, and Compliance Liabilities
However, a bigger concern is that paper documents pose significant security, risk, and compliance issues.
First, physical documents can be lost or stolen, and there is also the possibility of damage from fire, water, or other external forces.
We have seen numerous cases of a burst pipe or a local electrical fire destroying years of vital financial and other data stored on paper.
Have you ever considered what an unexpected office emergency would do to your physical files? In today’s world, a major office disaster can very quickly pose an existential threat to a business.
It’s a serious issue and one that many growing companies are simply unaware of, maybe until it is too late.
Finally, the physical storage of documents poses serious data security and risk issues, particularly as data privacy regulations become increasingly stringent.
Because a filing cabinet is a physical space, it’s difficult to implement strict access controls on who can enter and review documents stored there.
Thus, for example, employee records and other sensitive information can be left in a filing cabinet and then reviewed by unauthorized persons.
And, once a document is removed from a filing cabinet, it’s difficult to create a paper trail to prove who reviewed it and when.
Streamlining the Transition to Digital Workflows
Leaving paper behind is no longer a task reserved for large, multinational companies.
For a mid-sized company, a digital infrastructure is a necessity for continued growth and improved efficiency.
For example, with a digital infrastructure, your employees can access required information from anywhere, enabling more efficient team collaboration.
Furthermore, you can guarantee the protection of sensitive data through advanced encryption and user permissions.
However, many organizations have a vast amount of historical documents, which can be overwhelming to manage and could take up a considerable amount of a team’s time to organize, sort, and prepare for scanning.
To avoid this, we recommend outsourcing this task to professional document scanning services. While your core team manages the day-to-day tasks of your organization, scanning your historical documents can be left to the experts.
Professional technicians can scan your documents and convert them into secure digital files that can be searched for with a single click. And that’s the point. This not only saves your team a lot of time and stress but also allows them to focus on more important and profitable tasks.
Historical paper documents have to be scanned and made available in digital format.
Once this is done, the information is available for all teams involved in client servicing, like customer service, legal, and finance, within seconds. It is as simple as a search by keyword.
Reclaiming Your Physical and Digital Footprint
Saving square footage in an office can be critical, as this space is very expensive. In our experience, having filing cabinets filled with documents is a poor use of business resources.
By converting your paper archive to digital format, you can begin to free up much-needed space to work with clients, add additional inventory, or reduce overhead for less space.
So, a digital archive is easy to integrate with a company’s common software products. Therefore, for example, automatically routed digital invoices can be sent to decision-makers, or contract management software can automatically record the renewal dates of all contracts.
Also, in the human resources department, new employees can be introduced to the company without any printed paper.
Building a Scalable Foundation
The only way to build a scalable business is to build it on a scalable foundation, one that aligns with the business’s current needs and can grow with it.
That means it cannot be a physical document management system, as past constraints on such systems do not enable the efficiency today’s businesses require.
A physical-based system will only become less efficient over time as the business grows. Every new client, every new employee, will only add to the growing mountain of paper required to manage them.
That is not a foundation for a business, that is a house of cards waiting to fall.
Audit your document workflows today and set your company up for growth by adopting a more efficient digital approach to managing your information.
You and your team will reap the rewards of increased productivity while being able to work from anywhere.
Your data will be secure, and, most importantly, your business will operate in a manner that allows for growth without the constraints of inefficient paper-based systems.
