In an age where practically everything is digital, it’s hard to believe that some businesses still choose to rely on traditional systems to manage their documents. We all know that “old habits die hard”, but just because a habit is old, doesn’t mean that it’s the most efficient option. In fact, more often than not, the exact opposite holds true.
There are a number of reasons to invest time and money into becoming a paperless office. Since the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper annually, the US paper industry is responsible for the harvesting of 68,000,000 trees each and every year, just to keep up with demand. To further compound the problem, additional resources are consumed in order to convert those trees into the paper that fills your filing cabinets. By converting to a digital, paperless workplace, you can help reduce the impact your business has on the environment and effectively reduce your ecological footprint.
Along with helping the environment, going paperless with document management software also makes financial sense. The average office worker spends about 50% of their day creating, preparing, and searching for documents. With a proper document management system in place, these same workers can easily create, prepare, route, and locate documents in a matter of seconds, freeing up time for more important tasks.
A document management system also helps improve customer satisfaction by simplifying the document retrieval process. Instead of keeping your valued customer on hold while you tirelessly search through file cabinet drawers, you can quickly locate a particular invoice, receipt, or previous order details through a simple keyword search on your computer.
There’s more to document management than just storing and locating documents. With an enterprise document management system, like Content Central, you can vastly improve your office’s internal document workflow. In a snap, you can configure your document management system to route certain files to a specific folder, or even send them down a workflow chain of employees to make quick work the once-complicated document approval process.
Even though it may seem like a daunting task initially, document management software can make short work of digitizing all of the paper documents in your office. In no time, you’ll be able to say “goodbye” to all of those filing cabinets and “hello” to a more streamlined, efficient, and environmentally-friendly workplace.
