Saves Office Space and Money
With the cost of floor space in High-rise offices in Sydney and Melbourne you now have that ability to have staff working productively from home, you can downsize on your office area because you’re not occupying all of your floor’s space with filing cabinets.
You don’t have to have your staff locked at a desk in the office. Particularly when you want the best staff, to have solicitors, accountants, all of these very well qualified individuals being able to work potentially anywhere 24-7, as the Company they work for is giving them the flexibility to work anywhere, so they’re not tied to a desk, the days of locking people into a dedicated workspace scenario is declining.
If you can bring all of your record management protocols into this era, you’ve now got a situation where you can glue all your best staff to the organisation because they enjoy working there. You’ve taken all of the mundane filing work away. You’re not filing and retrieving from filing cabinets. It’s just a better methodology.
The truth today is your staff is openly seeking technical change, filing and retrieving paper records is tedious and prone to misfiling and that’s just frustrating and frankly the most boring job in any workplace. People are seeking change. They are looking for easy access of information. If you can make them more productive, they will be happier.
Better Document Security & Storage
Document scanning enables Securitization of the information within an organization. Once you’ve scanned the record and it’s an electronic file, you can back that up either to DVD or the Cloud or your network server environment.
Another aspect regarding security considerations is Electronic Document Management Systems provide significant Security Controls for the information they contain: Each user will have an Audit Log Record of all interactions with the system such as files accessed, printed, emailed, deleted or version modifications to records.
The System Administrator can allocate access control to specified record types by departmental criteria or subsets of documents by classification i.e. HR Records, Payroll, Board Papers etc would have limited access to only nominated users.
It provides the company with disaster recovery benefits. If you scan your vital records it ensures the ongoing survival of the business after a calamity such as a fire or flood, the information is securely backed-up and the recovery process is fully achievable. The opportunity of loss is now gone because you have basically secured it electronically via Tape or into the Cloud.
Environmentally Friendly
With today’s increasing environmental focus, scanning your documents enables a business move towards having a paperless office. Paper archives have a number of serious shortcomings, which at best cost time and money, and at worst threaten the viability of an organization.
For offices that have always relied on a great deal of paperwork, the change to a paperless office can be very dramatic, however the first step is to accept that the move from a paper-centric work environment to a fully digital one makes a lot of sense.
There are a lot of compelling arguments for Scanning paper Files, and once this has been started it’s very helpful in terms of the overall running of a business. Less paper is produced, proving friendlier to the environment and also helping to reduce business costs for photocopying and stationary. Physical transport of documents can also be cut, helping your carbon footprint.
Increased Efficiency, Saves Time
Document scanning and storing digitally, really does provide increased efficiency. It’s all about getting the most productivity from all staff, so rather than administration staff filing documents or ferreting through a filing cabinets, the situation where there are inevitable misfiles and so lost time and redundant effort from the staff.
Document Scanning provides easy access to accounting, advertising, manufacturing or marketing information directly from their desktop – this information can then be disseminated to the production staff or clients effectively.
You also have the situation where you can always identify the most recent version of a document or drawing and you’re able to track those versions.
There’s also the opportunity for creating really effective workflows, so particularly in accounts payable situation where the incoming mail is scanned or EFT information has come through via email or the fax gateway – it then goes through an known process of acceptance to the critical people looking at those records, either signing off that, ‘Yes, we’ve received the goods. “Yes that payment is what we were quoted, that should be authorized.’ And so that productivity again is transferred across the accounts payable scenario in a fully electronic process rather than a paper processing and filing situation.
If you introduce document scanning in conjunction with Information management system that combines access to all data, this comprehensive approach to records/information management within the organization then becomes a hundred percent approach.
Improve Customer Service
The Net Result comes back to achieving overall staff productivity gains.
These days it’s truly a matter that the more competitive you are, the more nimble and capable of delivering information to your costumers or your potential customers, the perception is that you’re on the ball, client perception and information delivery is everything these days.
If you can demonstrate to your clients that you are able to provide requested information in a timely fashion, you will maintain those relationships much longer than your competition.