Paper Wars!

Most organizations are still fighting everyday battles with paper that is clogging up office space and slowing down processes.

A recent update from the 2014 AIIM Paper Wars, authored by Doug Miles, found that although keeping electronic records to save office space, improve business processes and overall cost of handling paper is much acknowledged, but billions of unnecessary paper copies are still being printed every day around the world. The paper free office has always been the hype, but yet nearly impossible to achieve. Instead, as noted in this battlefield update, paper free processes have now taken over the front line instead of the elusive paper free office. With all the compelling reasons for all digital processes, none will be more important than the speed of response most notably to the customer, client or individual. Business-at-the-speed-of-paper is not an appealing maxim and is likely to be unacceptable in a few years time, in what will be an increasing mobile, remote working, just in time world, Doug noted.

This update is great news for those in the document imaging business and opportunities in any organization abound sooner than later. Get the troops mobilized and hit the ground running.

This is a great paper and must read for the document imaging community, especially on the sales front. It gives an in-depth look at the amount of paper in the office, plans to remove it and much more. You can download a copy of this report at www.aiim.org/research

Here are just a few key findings on paper in the office:

68% of respondents agree that business-at-the-speed-of-paper will be “unacceptable in just
a few years’ time”. 46% consider that the biggest single productivity improvement for most of their
business processes is to remove the paper.

Only 35% of organizations have a maxim to drive paper out of the business, with just 19%
having endorsement at board-level. 56% have an environmental impact policy including reduced use
of paper, but only 24% proactively promote it.

Overall paper consumption is decreasing in 44% of organizations compared to 35% three years
ago. However, it is still increasing in 21%. Paper flowing through processes is decreasing for 46% of
organizations, increasing for 25%.

Over half of respondents print personal paper copies to take to a meeting, or to add a signature.
They also use printed copies for reading offline or out-of-the-office (50%), and particularly to review and
mark-up (45%).

The average space taken up in offices to store paper is 13.5% (down from 15.3% in 2011).
Respondents suggest that with electronic-only filing, this would halve to 6.7% in 5 years’ time.

Lack of management initiatives and the (perceived) need for physical signatures are given as
the top reasons why there is still so much paper in business processes. There is also felt to be a
general lack of understanding of paper-free options.

I highly recommend reading the rest of this report and leveraging this research to better help you in pursuit of helping companies achieve paper free processes.

“© AIIM 2014, www.aiim.org”