Even as the average workplace increasingly becomes more digital, documents still play an important role.
There are more than four trillion paper documents in the United States alone and they are growing at a rate of 22 percent a year. Even as users send and receive an average of 133 e-mail messages per day, employees still need documents. The average document in the workplace is photocopied 19 times and professionals spent 50 percent of their time searching for information and an average of 18 minutes to locate a document.
Clearly, paper documents still play an important role in business, but as more time passes businesses will always be looking for ways to reduce costs and work more efficiently. Digital scanning services can help businesses accomplish both things, putting documents at the fingertips of employees rather than being hidden away in file cabinets.
Whether you’re looked to convert microfiche, microfilm or scan paper documents, digitial scanning can help. Here are four ways digital scanning services can benefit the average business:
Getting Rid Of Clutter
On average, it takes an employee five minutes to walk to a filing cabinet, find a document, do what’s needed with it and then return it. If there are multiple file cabinets, that process could take even longer. There’s no doubt file cabinets are great for storing information, but too many file cabinets can leave an office with a severe lack of space. Digital scanning services can do away with file cabinets, taking the contents of an entire file cabinet and scanning it to be stored on a hard drive or even in cloud storage.
Securing Important Information
As useful as file cabinets may be now, they’re not always used correctly. Approximately 7.5 percent of all documents get lost and three percent of the remainder are misfiled. There’s no greater annoyance for an employee than aimlessly searching for a hard-to-find document that’s been misfiled and impossible to find. On average, companies spend $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document.
Digital scanning services allow for converting documents from paper to digital files and allow businesses to store them however they wish. When it comes to saving converted documents, businesses can rest easy by storing them on data management systems that are automatically backed up or on cloud storage with much more space than the average file cabinet.
Helping The Environment
The average office employee uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper per year (or about four reams per person). It’s also estimated that about 6,800 of those 10,000 sheets are wasted.
All that copier paper leaves a heavy environmental footprint and more and more businesses are doing what they can to go paperless. Relying less on paper not only reduces a company’s carbon footprint, but it also reduces day-to-day costs of photocopying and buying stationary. Another added benefit is that less photocopying and use of paper reduces the need to physically transport large amounts of paper.
Saving Time and Improving Service
By doing more document scanning and imaging, a company can create a digital database of its files and make information a lot easier to find. Customers will benefit as well because important information can now be found with a few keystrokes and button clicks instead of wasting time digging through file cabinets.
Seventy seven percent of business owners want to be able to access file remotely and on site scanning services can do just that. Rather than piles of paperwork, owners will be able to access a searchable digital database that will ultimately save time, eliminate human error when it comes to filing and save money as well.
In addition to owners, employees will be helped as well. Ninety two percent of knowledge workers collaborate over documents via e-mail and digital scanning services help facilitate that process even more. The same thing goes for cloud-based sharing where employees can review, edit and share documents easily.
Any way you slice it, going digital makes things easier. It saves money and reduces a company’s carbon footprint by reducing the need for paper. It also allows businesses to work smarter and eliminates the frustration of digging through stacks and cabinets full of paper files.
