Gardner on Going Paperless

Transitioning Your Company from Paper to Paperless

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Out of the Red and into the Green: Transitioning Your Company from Paper to Paperless

According to IDC, US companies spend $25 to $35 billion processing, filing, storing and retrieving paper. Management of documents over their life cycle pushes that figure up to $100 billion a year.

Coopers and Lybrand released a study that showed that the average office:
•    Makes 19 copies of each document;
•    Spends $250 recreating each lost document;
•    Spends $20 on labor for filing each document;
•    Loses 1 out of 20 documents;
•    Spends $120 searching for every misfiled document; and
•    Spends $25,000 to fill a 4-drawer file cabinet and $2,000 annually to maintain it!

Federal laws combined with business needs have finally made digital signatures a legal and valid alternative to traditional pen and paper-based contracts. Step back for a minute and analyze the traditional business process. You’ve got a contract that needs to get from London to Cincinnati tomorrow. After you print it, sign it and insert it into the fax machine or wait for the courier, consider a few questions:

•    How do you know the status of your contract?
•    How do you know your end recipient or customer is sensitive to your timeline?

Let’s assume the contract is returned by the deadline. What do you do with it now?

•    Enter the data into back office systems?
•    Scan it, file it and hope you can find it again?

At the end of this time, energy and cost-consuming process, how much did this all cost?  Once you receive the ‘completed’ document, keep your fingers crossed that there aren’t any legal, audit, critical information or signatures missing, because when there are holes in your document trail the costs of settlement, litigation and lost goodwill can be enormous.

The obvious environmental and cost savings in electronic agreement and digital signature products are many: Whether it’s the overall reduction of a company’s carbon footprint, the end of paper storage or the courier costs of shipping and processing paper around the world, more and more companies are seeing green initiatives as imperative.

Electronic agreements and digital signatures are no longer the future; they are here and ready to ease the burden on many aspects of business communication. If change is on your radar screen, the key is to make it scalable, roll it out one business unit at a time and choose a system that doesn’t require a monolithic ‘big bang’ implementation.

The ability to start and end digital with electronic agreements and digital signatures allows organizations to minimize risk, eliminate mail, fax and courier, reduce administration costs and streamline processes.

At the end of the day, switching to a system that utilizes the company’s existing IT infrastructure and harnesses the power of interactivity will save even more money because most digital signature platforms are scalable and flexible. Isn’t that what the future of technology is all about?

As companies are expected to do more with fewer resources, it’s time to consider a solution that doesn’t re-invent the wheel, but only refines it. Add to that the prospect of being green and reducing your overall carbon footprint and you’ve made the wheel turn a lot more efficiently.

The time is now to start digital and end digital.