Look Beyond the Trees

“Cutting annual paper use by 500,000 sheets can save a company $515,000 a year (more than $1 saved per sheet)”
Source: JP Morgan.

It is estimated that: It costs $20 to file a document, $120 to find a misfiled document, and $220 to reproduce a lost document.

7.5 percent of all documents get lost; 3 percent of the remainder are misfiled.

The average document is photocopied 19 times.

Professionals spend only 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% of their time looking for the right information

6000 pages equal 1 tree. For  large companies and government agencies that have several hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, that does translate to a lot of trees.

Of course, the benefits of migrating from a paper-based system to a paperless system go beyond saving trees. Other benefits include increasing productivity, reducing operating cost, improving customer satisfaction, and even increasing sales.

Regardless of the industry you are in, or the size of your company, the benefits are definitely there. The real challenge is migrating to an efficient paperless system. In order to attain the benefits, you must streamline your existing processes first. The worst thing you can do is mirror your paper-based system to an automated system. I have heard it too many times where companies implement their existing system “As-Is” onto the new software that they just bought. Don’t make that same mistake. Being able to streamline and optimize your process is more valuable than any technology you end up buying.

To streamline your processes means eliminating unnecessary steps and combining tasks. For those who have been doing process optimization already know what I’m talking about. For those who are new to the concept, here are some basic steps towards achieving the benefits of a paperless system.

• Identify specific processes that you would like to improve. For instance, registration of a new member or customer, response to a customer question, delivery of a product, or collecting payment of a service or product.
• List or map out all the “As-Is” steps. If you have used tools like MS Visio, you can draw the process. Make sure to list all steps including 5-30 minute tasks like reviewing a document. You can also decide to combine multiple tasks into a single task. For instance, scanning a document might take 3-5 steps but you can decide to combine them as a single task called “scanning the invoice.”
• Understand each step. Each step in your process by itself is a mini-process. You need to identify the task, the performer (including manual or automated), estimated time, and actual average time. There are other details that you can also gather. For the purposes of this blog, these initial information is sufficient for now.
• Now comes the fun part or in some cases, the hard part. Identify the tasks that can be eliminated or combined. If you are using business process analysis (BPA) tools from SAP, EMC, IBM, or others, you’ll be able to analyze the effects of your changes through simulation. Alternatively, you can simply use a spreadsheet or a good old calculator with pen and paper.
• When you’ve made your analysis, you should see a reduction in processing time, cost, with less paper. When you’re ready, then start implementing your changes. You do not need to implement all of them at the same time. You can through a business process life-cycle methodology, make a change, generate analysis reports, re-model your changes (if needed), then implement the new model. This life-cycle methodology has been practiced by successful companies regardless of size.

-Erwin Chiong