What is the key to a paperless office?
A paperless office, one that uses little or no paper, is a high aspiration for many organisations.
There is much more to paperless than saving the environment, although that is an important driver.
There are very significant business advantages in going paperless. Many people who are reluctantly facing a paperless office in their future talk about the cons, but they seem unaware of the many pros of paperless.
The business advantages include saving money on paper, printers and postage, saving space, making documentation and information sharing easier and as a result, boosting productivity.
The big plus for workers is the ability to work anywhere, including at home.
Digital systems can manage information far better than paper. Digital records can be searched and sorted and reported on in endless creative ways. Data can be accessed from multiple locations, the office, the home, the subway or a foreign country. Paper records go out of date but digital records are easily updated. Video clips and other enhancements can be added to documents.
The paperless office became possible because of IT, and with recent advances in IT paperless is becoming easier and easier.
Electronic signatures are now accepted and tools like DocuSign and Adobe are widely used.
Scanners are available and affordable to convert paper based information into digital documents.
The last impediment to a true paperless office has been the need to include the external world in paperless, not only the people within the organisation. Increasingly, organisations are building digital only profiles with their customers and suppliers. The contact page for many organisations provides no street address and no telephone number, only communication portals or email addresses.
Dazychain is the natural way to migrate to a paperless office.
Dazychain stores all documents and communications and supplier invoices. The advantages of being digital quickly become apparent when all your documents are available anywhere, you don’t need to carry home a briefcase of papers each night and you can check progress of all your projects and files. If you are a road warrior you can rely on your mobile phone.
Paperless people eventually get to the point where printing is a bit of a pest, and storing hard copies becomes a bother.