Paper productivity gains.

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that better control of your business documents is a sensible strategy for any business. We know that, it’s fairly obvious but do we really understand all of the benefits or indeed the costs of not managing paper.

Sometimes we just can’t see the wood for the trees!

 

Paper issues may appear trivial to business owners and that's because we’re so used to being so swamped in paper that we don’t see or understand the negative implication that poor management of paper can have. We’re complacent about paper because it’s always been there.

According to a survey by YouGov, the UK’s small and medium-sized enterprises waste more than £42.2 million per day in revenues looking for documents, something that could easily be remedied by creating a ‘paperless office’. Despite this, 65% of UK SMEs have still not taken this step.

 

All businesses can struggle with productivity, an area where small gains are huge victories. Big business have the power to make significant infrastructure investments and also have people focused purely on process improvement.

Smaller businesses however have the potential for much bigger productivity gains which can be delivered much quicker due to their agile nature. Productivity improvement does not have to come with big financial investment, smaller businesses should focus on small process improvements and therefore managing paper better has to be top of the pile.

Make sure you set the right expectation, work towards a "Less Paper" office rather than a "Paper Less" office - isolate each paper process and improve it. Document scanning and management has got to be one of the easiest ways to introduce process improvement.  

The paper burden in Small Business.

Sound familiar?

There’s paper everywhere but I can never find the information I need. Come on what have I done with it! Argh...I must have thrown it away, or maybe I left it at home. I’ll have to go through this pile again! It must be in the filing cabinet, maybe it’s in my car. Really guys how much time do you have for this!

Scanning Paper

It really isn’t rocket science but please do take some care, you need to have a strategy! If you just scan paper you’ll be moving the problem from being a visible burden into an invisible and potentially disastrous situation.

So what should I do!

Set aside an hour or two, grab a cup of coffee and think! Think about the paper that you have now. Where does it come from, what do you do with it, how long do you really need to keep, but most importantly does it actually have any value?

Right what now?

Don’t try and fix the problem all in one go, you lived with this for long enough so give yourself time to get your strategy right! Start with the really important stuff.  Think small steps. 

I’m ready what do I do now?

Slow down, you’re not ready yet. You have to spend some money, it’s not for free. The good news however is that it doesn’t have to cost the earth. There are many different products and solutions but to make it easy here are two choices.

Simple

Yes, this will be for most of you, as you don’t have time for complex and you are the IT department. Buy a ScanSnap, it’s a full solution. Don’t take my word for it (SPOILER ALERT – I do have an interest here) go to AMAZON in any country and read the reviews.

Slightly more Complex

Ok, first of all set aside time for some real research. Assuming you already have a computer you need to buy just two things, a scanner (don’t buy a flatbed scanner – life is far too short for that) and some Document Management Software. Relax, it doesn’t have to be too hard you’re not an intrepid explorer going where no man has gone before but you do have to invest some time here. If you’re in a paper intensive line of work, accountancy, legal, medicine there are plenty of packages available that are customised for your environment, we’ve just narrowed the search considerably already. If not then google is your friend!

Little Steps again.

Whichever way you decide to go, don’t forget small steps. Focus on developing your strategy for different types of documents. Why don’t you start with your expenses and receipts then move on to customer correspondence, Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Take the first little step today.

The truth about paper

As inventions go it has to be said that paper was one of the better ones. Whoever you decide to credit, whether the ancient Egyptians (Papyrus) or the Chinese chap T’sai Lun, who fabricated a sheaf more representative of what we have today, they could never have known how enduring it’s become never mind how prolific.

According to Wikipedia paper consumption has increased by 400% in the last 40 years and at the same time the world has gone into technological overdrive. So despite all of these technological advancements, including the dawn of new media and the digital age it seems that we’re still totally addicted to paper.

So what is it that we love so much about paper? Is it the way it feels? Is it the way it reads? Or maybe it’s just the best way to present information. Maybe we prefer something tangible or perhaps despite our technological advancements we haven’t been able to come up with anything better.

Sure we have electric paper and yes the Kindle, the iPad and other eReaders have resulted in less books being sold, although the book is doing much better than the CD in the digital age! The US book market only declined by only 2.5% in 2011 even though eBook sales grew by 31%. Bizarrely in the UK paper books incur no VAT whereas eBooks attract the highest rate of tax at 20%, this is hard to imagine given that paper is so environmentally damaging to manufacture and also incurs considerable logistics to transport.

There’s no doubt that we send a heck of a lot of e-mails but certainly any talk prophesising the demise of our mail services is greatly exaggerated. Whilst letter volumes have decreased by 6% since 2011 the Royal Mail still deliver more than 58M letters every day! Some believe that snail mail will outlive email particularly given that many of the next generation use social media to communicate; perhaps many of them will never even have the need for an email address. Just like texting is replacing the phone call, (imagines a world where we don’t talk to each other anymore) it appears that tweeting and instant messaging is replacing e-mail.

And that’s the conundrum for businesses; paper will remain an essential medium of communication containing hugely important content. Paper is expensive to retain, maintain, action or refer back to. Those businesses that implement capture solutions extracting valuable information and expediting important business processes can now react quicker than their competitors but they can also secure valuable prizes with reduced or redeployed headcount and efficiencies that can include; for example, early payment discounts. Once confidence is gained many business also remove the costs of paper storage by secure disposal, hey most new offices don’t have room for rows of filing cabinets.

Back to the longevity of paper, amazingly the University of Cambridge has even developed a laser which can remove toner that has already been fused on the page, a sort of “do it yourself” attempt at recycling which although missing the point by the proverbial “country mile” is still an ingenious achievement, but once again begs the question why can’t we just print less?

My belief is that toner and ink are the real “black gold” and that the influence of their purveyors,  inspired by the invention of Gutenborg  and growing fat on huge profits will lobby hard for the virtues of print and paper consumption will ultimately prevail. I’d hazard a guess that printer ink is more expensive than oil!! Did you ever wonder why when printing your boarding card that it is followed like some kind of unstoppable paper flood with page after page of useless information or that when you print web content that the “print preview function” is totally disregarded and the result is a smorgasbord of content over far too many pages.

The futurists may yearn for new media to finally deliver the “holy grail” that is the “paperless office” but given that technology appears not to be reducing paper consumption greatly perhaps the “less paper office” is now the real prize.  
Environmentalists quite rightly bang the drum of de-forestation and pull on our heart strings with pictures of cuddly animals going extinct, articles that get picked up and covered in everything from the red tops to the broadsheets like some kind of ironic parody.  The truth is that the production of paper requires not only shaving the face of the earth of indispensable trees but also requires vast quantities of fresh drinking water in locations where the need is obviously greater for the indigenous people.

And of course paper production is an intensive process driven by the polluting filth of heavy machinery spoiling some of the most beautiful and previously untouched parts of the world, displacing previously undiscovered peoples like some modern day industrial revolution.

The realists see a world where paper will always have a place, changing habits that have been learned over thousands of years is no small task. New generations will learn about the increased productivity from truncating the paper process (by scanning and capturing an electronic image) and as our dwellings reduce in size people will begrudge the storage room required to house our life on paper.  Let’s be pragmatic and realise that the “paperless office” is a mirage, we cannot totally replace the best form of media ever invented but we can control how prolific it could become.

And the shareholders of large printer companies surely have nothing to fear in the short term, it’s just a shame that the relatives of Mr. Lun or for that matter those of Gutenborg were not afforded a small royalty based on the discoveries of their ancestors as they surely would be competing to be some of the wealthiest people that ever lived.