A paperless tomorrow starts with less paper today
Posted by Marya Ulis on Wed, Oct 12, 2011 @ 01:25 PM
A recent blog post over on the AIIM expert blogs got me to thinking about how complex a move to paperless is for most companies. In his post, entitled "If you want to be paperless, eat your own dog food," the author talked about how people in the ECM and capture industries still rely heavily on paper. “Almost comically so,” he said, recounting his experience at a paper-capturing and digital-workflow-process conference, where paper documentation seemed to be the norm rather than the exception.
Unfortunately, until every conference host is 100 percent certain that every attendee will come armed with a laptop, that’s probably going to remain the case.
"Paperless" may still seem like a dream...
And the same holds true for the enterprise, at the departmental level and as a whole: Until companies stop producing paper—paper purchase orders, paper invoices, paper contracts, paper checks—the dream of an entirely paperless organization will remain just that, a dream.
The Aberdeen Group reports that 72 percent of invoices still arrive in paper format, and that 75 percent of companies employ predominantly manual AP processes. So we know we’re still a long way off from realizing the dream.
...but "less paper" can be a reality
But what we see every day here at ImageTag is that large and small companies alike are moving towards a paperless tomorrow by starting with less paper today. If that’s your mindset—if you’re looking to take steps towards less paper—then you’ll be glad to know that less paper doesn’t necessarily require complicated, expensive technology and implementations that involve Zone OCR, eInvoicing, or a T&M project that goes on forever.
Instead, you can get your start in “less paper” simply by switching to a paperless workflow approach that links incoming and outgoing documents—purchase orders, invoices, contracts, change orders, packing lists, even incoming and outgoing electronic documents—with transactions in your ERP.
Imagine, for example a “less paper” flow that could surround an incoming pdf invoice received by email. Instead of printing the invoice or forwarding it on for approval and later printing, you could electroncially "attach" the email and invoice to the proper transaction, and then route the email and invoice on for approval and ultimate payment, maintaining the email trail along the way and never printing a document. You’ve saved a tree, money, and time, and maintained an audit trail along the way.
This type of transactional document management process works even if you’re using EDI—the system parses the EDI file and then sends it—with all related transactional details available within a click or two—along your approved route for processing. Again: Time saved. Paper saved. Audit trail maintained.
The path to less paper isn't necessarily steep and painful
What excites us here at ImageTag is that implementing such a system doesn’t have to be difficult; nor does it have to cost as much as a space shuttle launch. If you use Microsoft Dynamics GP, AX or NAV, and/or Microsoft SharePoint, then click here to learn more about KwikTag, our favorite transactional content management system. KwikTag is as easy on the budget as it is to implement.
Granted, we’re admittedly biased, but in a space crowded with expensive, sophisticated ECM systems that make “paperless” a far-off dream for all but the largest, cash-flush companies, KwikTag stands out as a practical option for companies of all sizes looking to realize the benefits of less paper—today.
(By the way, if you read the linked blog post at the start of this piece, you might also like to know that we at KwikTag do "eat our own dogfood"; we use KwikTag internally to capture and manage the paper related to our transactions!)