New Survey Highlights Benefits of Being Paper-Free
We were excited to get our hands on AIIM’s latest report, “The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?”
After all, turning inbound paper into useful digital information for the enterprise is DATAMARK’s specialty, and these big AIIM surveys provide an excellent snapshot of the ongoing effort to keep paper from slowing down business.
AIIM, a non-profit association of information professionals, surveyed more than 400 member companies and organizations from across all industry and government sectors for the report, released this month.
AIIM’s goal was to evaluate the success of paper-elimination projects, and determine where and why paper documents are still being used in organizations. The AIIM researchers also wanted to see what companies were effectively using the “digital mailroom” concept as well as mobile capture devices.
Here are some of the report’s notable findings, in no particular order:
The biggest organizations are having the most success with paperless initiatives. Companies with more than 5,000 employees are seeing a net of 15 percent decrease of paper consumption, whereas small and mid-sized companies haven’t changed much since AIIM last paper-consumption survey in 2009.
Electronic-only filing could cut paper storage space in half in five years. The average amount of office space used to store paper is 15.3 percent. It would drop to 7.4 percent with electronic-only filing, saving nearly 8 percent in overall office costs.
Forty-one percent of organizations are embracing the “digital mailroom” concept, either at a central location or distributed at satellite offices. Four percent of these digital mailrooms are outsourced.
Organizations using scanning and capture technologies believe that it improves customer response times by up to six times or more. Seventy percent see an improvement of at least 3-times, and nearly a third witness an improvement of 10-times or more.
Twenty percent of survey respondents said they scan half or more of their inbound mail at or before entry into the organization. Twenty percent said they scan at the point-of-process, and 29 percent scan after the process to an archive.
The survey reinforces the benefits DATAMARK has delivered to clients that have chosen an outsourced digital mailroom solution. To quote the AIIM researchers, “…the big reason to head paper off at the door is to prevent it clogging up processes and to mobilize its content. Improved access and sharability to other staff, faster response to customers, and better process productivity are the three big gains.”
To download the full AIIM report, click here.
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