Documents: Going Paperless, Staying Paperless

By Author: Donald Nason
Total Articles: 48
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I write a lot about the benefits of the paperless office, the paperless process – I posted a blog last week, 'Going paperless – from the individual to the business' and the previous week wrote about 'Storing documents – legal requirements and how to solve the paper-mountain issue'.
And the benefits of converting paper documents to electronic are indisputable: there are the green and environment issues, the reduced storage costs, the security aspects of keeping documents safe from fire and water damage, the compliance benefits electronic storage brings – plus employees have access 24/7 to the documents they need to do their work.

I report on organisations moving to paperless systems. In March it was announced that the Ministry of Justice was introducing the use of crime eForms and that from 1 April 2013 would no longer be accepting paper versions.

Just this week an article appeared in ComputerWeekly saying that a number of British police forces were moving paper-based processes with the general public to online, and starting with firearms licensing – their heading ‘UK police start to tear up Dickensian ...
... transactional processes’, with Dickensian a reference to the Director of Resources UK Policing Matthew Bennion-Pedley’s comment on the current system. So far 38 forces spread across England and Wales have shown interest and it’s said to be the first time a group of police forces has got together to move to an e-commerce solution without a direction from government.

Sometimes the conversion of paper to electronic is treated as an end in itself – but the benefits of going paperless are so much greater than just the storing and access aspects. Automated workflow streamlines processing, enhancing process cycle times, and brings a whole host of BI (business intelligence) and management information benefits.

And yet many organisations seem to be missing this trick – AIIM recently reported on the findings of a research paper highlighting that more than half the organisations surveyed said they retyped data from scanned images. This, as AIIM points out, means that an employee is effectively printing an electronic document from which to rekey the data to create a further electronic document, with all the attendant time element and risk of mis-keying disadvantages.

Automated data extraction, such as via OCR (optical character recognition) and barcode technology, can identify essential data from any original document format – Word, PDFs, emails – and the extracted data validated against an organisation’s ERP, enterprise content management, or other information repository.

Documents can then be routed to the appropriate person/department or for the relevant action. Captured information can also be used to automatically update line of business applications.

Automating some of the processing leaves staff free to concentrate on more strategic tasks, with the processing configured to meet business rules and policies. Improved security comes from being able to define authorisation access, and escalation strategies can be inbuilt.

With far greater visibility and control throughout the processing, the reporting and BI tools also provide enhanced management and analytical information – and finally the data can be posted automatically to any line of business system, ERP, Human Resources or CRM application, via seamless interfaces.

The whole business process is more efficient, and the costs come down. Organisations automating invoice processing, for example, regularly report a return on investment of between 6-12 months.