Do you still print to approve?

Far too many organisations are still allowing areas of their business processes to stagnate at the expense of efficiency and with a negative impact on earnings. From a relatively simple paper based filing process, that requires significant manual effort to not only store but retrieve, to a complex flow with invoicing, postage, multiple approvers and re-scanning with multiple digital versions stored in different locations.

Whichever scenario your organisation potentially falls closest to, there are simple, cost effective solutions that can reduce overheads of time, costs and secure your organisation against future compliance, regulatory or customer dissatisfaction.

A couple of scenarios below, whilst overly exaggerated and simplified will hopefully illustrate how.

The simple store and retrieve

Your organisation receives documents via mail (paper), email (PDF / Word) and creates documents to be sent to clients. Just because it's the way it's always been done, every document that is received or created is printed and filed in a cabinet. Annually, documents older than 3 years are re-filed into storage boxes and sent offsite.

The key here is that most of the documents important to this organisation are already digital, so why turn them into a medium that is stuck in one location and needs to be physically sought after? Simply by ditching the physical filing cabinet in favour of a document management system, your organisation would:

• Reduce the employee time overheads of printing and filing from minutes to a matter of seconds
• Reduce the employee time overheads in retrieving information to seconds
• Enable the ability to share documents (without duplication) to any employee
• Enable the ability to share documents to anywhere at anytime*, expediting customer, supplier, audit or management information requests
• Reduce the risk of loss with backups and / or cloud storage
• Reduce the cost of long term (archive storage) and employee time to maintain

You can view our case study where this exact scenario was addressed. Physical filing can cost as much as £15 per item and retrievals can equate to 10% of an employee's time. A lost file is estimated to cost £146 and with an SME averaging 750 lost documents a year, the cost soon mounts up.

The simple approval process

Your organisation receives all documents electronically and everything is stored centrally on a shared drive (local network or cloud). Employees locate the documents by browsing through a folder structure and using the document name. Some documents require approval from management before proceeding which needs to be evidenced. To achieve this, a copy is printed and physically signed by the appropriate manager before being re-scanned and saved.

The organisation here has started to work towards digital transformation but has only gone so far as to centrally secure their information, the processes around it are still grossly inefficient and could be improved dramatically by using a document management system:

• Reduce employee storage times with standardised indexing criteria (reducing catalogue errors)
• Improve employees retrieval times through dedicated search tools
• Remove duplicate potential
• Allow sharing of documents (without duplication) directly to managers / approvers
• Gain digital approvals at anytime from anywhere* preventing delays
• Record digital signatures or stamps with task management against the original documents
• Allow approval redirection or escalation when responses are not received
• Full audit and regulatory compliance reporting

It is estimated following initial customer reviews post implementation of a DMS that efficiency / productivity increases are between 10-30% in the first 45 days. As further changes are made, processes are improved and further departments integrated, feedback shows a time saving potential of up to 80%.

The complex, multi-site document storm

Your organisation has several locations, each responsible for its own processes with suppliers and clients. Key documents, whether digital or paper in origin, are stored on a local system, copied (to paper) which are sent (via post) to head office. Head office scan (digitise) the received paperwork into their own repository before being archived offsite. Occasionally, copies are made in head office for validation, audit purposes or even official signature. Of those documents, some are posted back to the original site (after signatory approval) and then re-filed there as proof.

This is a not very exaggerated version of a true story… The organisation would definitely benefit from a centralised document management system, potentially cloud based, that would allow each site to maintain the original versions, work on their own specific information but also give instant access to the centralised office for review, approval and audit:

• Remove the duplication of all documentation
• Remove the delays in document review caused by post 
• Remove basic costs (paper, envelopes, postage fees, employee time to prepare)
• Allow sharing of documents (without duplication) directly to managers / approvers
• Gain digital approvals at anytime from anywhere* preventing delays
• Create enhanced workflows to track, remind, manage multiple life cycles stages and set retention policies
• Allow approval redirection or escalation when responses are not received
• Full audit and regulatory compliance reporting

In a previous article, a simple calculation for handling an email with an attachment that required management review (within the same office - no postage etc) showed a minimum time difference of 4.5 minutes** per email (In reality this is a best case scenario difference). If the average office worker receives 121 emails a day, that would be a 2hrs 15mins minimum saving per day - not accounting for all the physical costs.

Yes these are exaggerated scenarios, however, they hopefully show how simple change in where documents are stored and how processes are conducted can have a significant impact on an organisation.

So where would you start in your organisation?

* Subject to security controls

** With paper waiting on a desk, the potential for delay is far greater, counted in days rather than minutes in some cases.

Toby Gilbertson, Director of Operations. February 2024

#pacsoluk #businessprocessmanagement #documentmanagement #digitaltransformation #taskautomation