There is a common misunderstanding regarding what the paperless office is all about. Most people think that this means an organization will have absolutely no paper once a solution is implemented. This couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s also a huge intimidation factor when organizations think about going paperless and implementing a document management system. The truth is document management should be easy. For years organizations have been talking about the paperless office. This “office of the future” would have so much digital automation that paper would be unnecessary. When the personal computer was introduced to the consumer market this seemed like it might be a reality one day. Here is the reality:

Paper is not going away. It’s going to be around for a long, long time.

Paper isn’t a bad thing. There are many situations where it makes sense to handle physical paper. For instance when reading a book most people prefer to read a printed book rather than on a small digital reader such as the Kindle from Amazon. This is the most efficient way to read a book or newspaper. Not many people want to read hundreds of pages from a digital screen.

The true paperless office is a solution that gets rid of the inefficiencies associated with the manual processing of documents. When an organization is manually processing documents like invoices, purchase orders, check runs, and service work orders there is a natural percentage of error that occurs while routing these documents.

• Loss of documents – when manually routing invoices for approval you will lose documents. Organizations and their employees have many things going on at once and sometimes documents just get buried with other paperwork and never surface again.
• Slow processing times – When documents are not easily available for review when someone is ready to work on them your processing times suffer.
• No business visibility – Since documents are not stored in a central location you have no idea where they are in your business process. Looking for a specific invoice that needs to get paid? Good luck finding it.

So you might think, “We are scanning our documents and storing them in a share on our network, we are paperless!”

You might be “paperless” but you are still inefficient. Storing documents on a share brings its own set of problems:

• Conflicting versions – A share is not ideal for creating a document and all its revisions. If users are emailing these documents to other individuals for approval how do you know they are always looking at the latest version?
• Security – Securing your network shares requires IT staff and maintenance. Most of the time everyone can just see the entire share.
• Backup – Your data is as good as it’s redundancy. As your repository grows backups become more cumbersome and take longer. If you backups are not being verified then how do you know they will work when you need them?

The paperless office gets rid of all the inefficiencies that cost you time and money. When your organization begins to electronically process documents you gain a number of efficiencies.

Never lose a document again. Since all your documents are housed in a central repository all your users are working off of the latest version and the documents never get lost. When a user is ready to work on documents they are always ready. This means increased productivity for all your users. No more waiting for a document. It’s always ready.

Need to know where a specific document is and why it’s taking longer than expected to go through your organization? Easy.

Need to access the current version of a document and compare it to previous versions? Easy.

Security is simple once you move towards an electronic management system.

Backup. This is where the SaaS model that docAssist provides comes in handy. We backup your data every day, multiple times actually. Your data is always safe.

Can you completely rid your organization of all paper by using docAssist? Sure. Is it a reality? Probably not, its not practical. The real paperless office takes those repetitive manual processes that consume an organization and streamline them so that an organization can focus on its core business rather than chase down paperwork.