Launch A Paperless Process
In Less Than 90 Days
www.docuware.com
Launch A Paperless Process In Less Than 90 Days 2
Taking a process paperless makes working more fluid
and productive by transforming manual work flows and
automating repetitive tasks. And recent technology
advances have made going paperless both easier and
essential.
When properly implemented and configured, paperless
office software helps people to quickly access the content
they need, complete tasks quickly and then archive the
file securely. It frees them from tedious, time-consuming
tasks and the frustrations of not being able to find
information.
At this point, it’s likely that many of your customers and
supply-side partners already have electronic processes
in place. This means that going paperless has a greater
impact on your larger business ecosystem than ever
before. Not only are you digitizing your own internal
paper-based processes, but it also allows you to extend
your digital workflows to these external organizations.
When you’re interacting in an entirely electronic
environment, processing invoices, purchase orders and
even service orders happens faster and with greater
accuracy. For example, if a supplier submits information
to you electronically, your paperless office software is
able to automatically capture data from those files and
forms, eliminating redundant data entry. This allows your
employees to focus on reviewing data instead of keying
it in.
The benefits of going paperless are numerous. Here are
just a handful of reasons why more organizations are
working to make more paperless processes a reality:
1. Streamlined workflows: When the right content
is accessible at the touch of a button, it takes only
seconds to route and share documents to any
number of people across multiple departments and
systems. This ease of access greatly improves
efficiency in a variety of contexts, such as approval
processes.
Going Paperless
Going paperless has a greater impact on your
larger business ecosystem than ever before.
Launch A
Paperless
Process ...
... In Less Than 90 Days
Organizations around the world feel the pressure to accomplish more and more with fewer re-
sources. For many employees, it’s a struggle to stay on top of daily workflows because they’re
inundated with information and hampered by inefficient, paper-based business processes.
Launch A Paperless Process In Less Than 90 Days 3
2. Greater agility: Your competitors are only going to
get faster, and the agility that a paperless process
gives you is vital to remaining competitive.
3. Reduced business risks: A fully digital
environment allows you to work not only faster,
but also safer. Access controls and data security
make it easier and less expensive to maintain
compliance, and reduces the chance of missing
documents that could result in lost revenue.
Compared to a paper-based system, enterprise
content management (ECM) makes it easier
to protect business secrets and confidential
information, such as contract details as well as
employee and patient data.
4. Improved collections: Accounting departments
benefit greatly from going paperless, especially
when it comes to collections. A big challenge for
collections departments is that it’s often difficult
to access the necessary documents while on the
phone with a customer. With an ECM system,
critical business documents are easily retrievable,
which tends to shorten the collections cycle and
improve cash flow.
5. Increased visibility: Using digital workflows
instead of paper results in greater transparency,
allowing management to monitor business
processes in real time. This makes it easier to
keep tasks on track and to identify problems and
opportunities for improvement.
Could Your Process Go Paperless
In Less Than 90 Days?
If you’re planning to go paperless, it’s important to have
a timeframe for making the leap. “Paperless in 90 days”
is a great achievable goal for many organizations and
provides a rallying cry to get your team on the same
page. Setting a goal of achieving the paperless process
in less than 90 days also gives you a quarterly target to
address and hit while helping to maintain momentum. And
the sooner you reach that deadline, the sooner you start
enjoying the benefits of going paperless.
When you think about what would need to happen in 90
days to consider the initiative a success, it boils down to
setting goals for digitizing three areas:
1. Capturing information: Documents come into an
organization in several ways, such as email, faxes,
mail and forms. Each of these points of entry
must be digitized. As faxes and paper mail go
by the wayside, there’s less of a burden in terms
of scanning, but capturing email is increasingly
important.Creating a “smart inbox” allows people
to quickly feed emails into the right channels of
your system, whether that’s archiving it in your
central document repository or using it to launch
a business process. This ensures that the email
is captured in a way that moves tasks forward,
instead of piling up in individual email accounts.
Paperless In Less Than 90 Days
To build a paperless process in less than 90 days,
you need the right technology and a strategic, six-
step process.
1
Launch A Paperless Process In Less Than 90 Days 4
2. Routing information: Once information enters
your paperless office, it needs to be routed
through the organization. Here, the goal is to
replace paper shuffling with streamlined digital
workflows, with predefined processes for routing,
reviewing and approving documents.
3. Retrieving information: After the information has
been routed, it needs to be archived in a way that
allows for easy retrieval and managing access.
You want to be sure your digital documents are
captured, tagged and named correctly, so that
they’re easy to find with a search.
As an example, let’s look at how this digitizing process
would work in an accounting department. If your accounts
payable (AP) process is largely paper-based, there may
be several options for capturing invoices in electronic
form.
First, you could ask your vendors and suppliers if they’re
able to send you electronic invoices instead of paper.
Whether you’re receiving electronic invoices or scanning
in paper documents, intelligent indexing or intelligent
capture tools are able to automatically read files and
extract the essential information, such as the customer
name, invoice number, amounts, etc.
Once that information has been captured, the ECM
system could then use digital workflows to automatically
route them to the appropriate queues for processing. This
makes sure an invoice is routed to the right people for
review in a predefined approval process. The final step is
archiving the digital documents and accompanying data in
the ECM’s central document repository, already indexed
for easy retrieval later.
That’s just one example of what would need to happen
to bring a department into a paperless environment in 90
days. The big win in this example is that you significantly
reduce invoice processing time. Since the system is able
to extract much of the important data, employees don’t
need to spend a lot of time manually keying data into the
index fields. And instead of having multiple copies of a
document floating around, you have a single, authoritative
record, stored in a way that facilitates anytime, anywhere
access, which reduces the effort people must spend to
manage files. With a paperless ECM solution in place,
you capture it once, process it once and store it once.
To achieve this 90-day goal, you need the right paperless
office software and hardware. Equally important, you
need to break that goal into six smaller steps that follow a
strategic process.
6 Steps To Creating Your
Paperless Process
Here are the key stages in creating a paperless process
in less than 90 days. While it may be tempting to push
ahead and take shortcuts to hit that 90-day deadline,
each of these stages plays an essential role in creating a
successful paperless solution.
Developing The Leadership Team
The most fundamental requirement for a successful
initiative is getting buy-in from directors and C-level
executives. Getting that buy-in helps to set the direction
and goals for the project and push it forward. That’s why
the first stage in going paperless is to create an internal
ECM team.
This team should include the aforementioned leaders,
representative stakeholders and internal experts who
are able to offer feedback from each department about
the challenges and opportunities they face in going
paperless. You may also want to bring an external ECM
professional into the leadership team – either a third-party
consultant or ECM vendor – to guide the conversation
about what’s feasible.
The goal is to ensure that each department has a voice
in the initiative and understands the objectives and
what’s feasible. When selecting stakeholders, choose a
representative group of people who are able to explain
and disseminate this vision to the rest of the organization.
The stakeholders should also be high enough in the
organization that they’re able to push the leadership
team’s agenda, whether that’s to improve cash flow or
increase visibility into how long it takes to process files.
2 ECM Leadership Team
Without an ECM leadership team, a paperless
initiative is likely to fizzle due to lack of support.
3
Launch A Paperless Process In Less Than 90 Days 5
Without such a leadership team, the initiative is likely to
fizzle due to lack of support, or get stuck in conflicting
agendas.
It’s important to choose this team carefully: You need
different departments to work together toward a paperless
strategy, and directors often have their own ideas,
interests and problems. A common mistake is for one
department to resist changing the way it does business
while expecting other departments to accommodate them
by changing their methods.
When these situations arise, having an executive on
the team keeps the overarching goal in sight and helps
departments to work out their differences as you roll out
the system. Take a team approach, and focus on helping
everyone improve by going paperless.
Creating Awareness
Once you’ve created a leadership team, you need to
ensure that the team’s vision for the paperless process is
being shared with the end users. Creating this awareness
is key to effective change management.
Inevitably, some users are going to hesitate or resist
moving away from familiar, paper-based processes. But
when they see that the initiative has strong support at the
executive level and understand what it’s trying to achieve,
it reduces the tendency to keep doing things the old way,
and helps to connect users to the overall mission.
The last thing you want is for users to feel they’ve been
forced into a business process change without having
any input in designing the system. Too often, an ECM
leadership team focuses exclusively on the high-level
benefits for the organization and specific departments,
such as accounting or human resources, but fails to
communicate the benefits to individual end users.
End users tend to focus on their jobs and daily tasks,
rather than company-wide strategy, so they judge the
value of the paperless process based on how they think
it’s going to affect their job. If they don’t see a clear
benefit, they tend to drag their feet when it’s time to roll
out the ECM solution, and that hurts user adoption.
Creating awareness of the initiative’s high-level goals
early on helps to head off objections, because it gives
users time to get comfortable with the idea and develop a
better understanding of how it’s likely to impact their day-
to-day tasks.
One good way to spread the word is by sharing YouTube
videos or documentation that gives a high-level view of
the solution. It’s best to build a content library focused
on the benefits of the paperless office. The goal isn’t
to sell users on the technology features, but to create
awareness of how ECM improves specific areas of your
business.
By creating awareness early on, users are familiar with
the concepts and goals by the time you’re rolling out the
solution, rather than having something brand new forced
on them. The benefits of this stage may not be apparent
until later on in the process, but having everyone moving
toward the same goal of “paperless in 90 days” is a key
factor in a successful initiative.
Digging Into Your Business Processes
If you don’t have a clear understanding of your business
processes and what’s needed when moving them into a
digital environment, you’re likely to head down the wrong
path and end up with a system that fails to meet your
goals. Missing a key step could result in lost revenue
and carrying your current inefficiencies into the paperless
office.
Taking the time to dig into those processes ensures that
your ECM leadership team has a holistic understanding
and good visibility into your current bottlenecks. Your end
users know where these bottlenecks are, but executives
may not, so this “discovery” process is essential.
The goal here is to go through each process, identifying
the key steps and users’ frustrations with the current
system. Documenting these issues allows you to address
them later in the design step, and gives end users a voice
in the process.
As you follow the paper trail, you’ll find a lot of the
bottlenecks. Start by walking through the life cycle of a
specific document or process, and asking questions:
• What initiates the process – an email, a phone
call, a walk-in?
45
Efficiency And Job Satisfaction
Resolving user concerns with digital workflows
helps to improve efficiency as well as job
satisfaction.
Launch A Paperless Process In Less Than 90 Days 6
• Who’s involved in the process?
• How do you capture the information?
• Where do you route that document or data?
• Who needs to be notified?
• Where is it archived?
• How do you retrieve it later?
As you go through these questions, users may help you
identify problems, such as, “I wish it could do this,” or “It’s
wasteful that we have to do this.” Resolving those user
concerns as you create digital workflows helps to improve
efficiency as well as job satisfaction.
Designing The Solution
Once your team has good visibility into your business
processes, it’s time to work with an ECM expert (such as
a consultant or vendor) to design a paperless solution that
addresses the bottlenecks and other inefficiencies. Key
considerations include how to link files together, where
to share information and what index fields to build into
the system. These then determine what components and
features should be used in creating your paperless process.
The main goal for the design phase is to combine your
knowledge of your business needs with the expertise of
your ECM consultant or vendor, making sure you share a
common vision and that the vendor’s solution is going to
work for you. If the solution isn’t what you envisioned in
some way, there’s time to rethink and reconfigure various
aspects until it’s right.
One benefit of the design step is that it allows end users
to see what the solution is going to look like and helps
them visualize how the change could benefit them, which
tends to generate additional excitement about moving
to the paperless process. If you’ve followed the previous
three steps and engaged end users in the process, the
design phase is when they start asking, “How soon can
we install it?” They’ve had input in the discovery phase,
and the design shows them how their pains are going to
be addressed. They see the vision, and they want it.
That enthusiasm doesn’t just come from end users;
department heads also get excited when they see how
the paperless office is going to free up the team’s time for
higher-level tasks that they just don’t have time to tackle
with the old system.
Deploying Your ECM Solution
Depending on the design, deploying your ECM solution
might begin with a test system or occur in several phases.
This is also an important time to begin training. Have your
IT admins shadow the vendor or consultant while they’re
installing the system on your servers or in the cloud.
Once the system has been deployed, run through one of
your processes with a sample document or files, and use
this as a training exercise.
6Launch A Paperless Process In Less Than 90 Days 7
Deployment brings all of the earlier planning stages to
fruition. If you’ve followed the process, you’re ready to
begin applying the right technology to the right business
practices, becoming a paperless office.
Documenting Your Paperless Process
Think of your paperless process as a growing, evolving
ecosystem, not something you just set up and never think
about again. As your company grows, you’re going to
want to extend into new areas and new processes. The
goal is to prepare your company to support the system
going forward.
That’s why it’s essential to document the solution you’ve
put in place, including the findings of your discovery and
design phases and the system’s configuration settings.
Your documentation should also identify the admin users,
so that people know whom to contact internally when
questions arise.
What you don’t want to have happen is for someone to
take over an ECM leadership role from someone else and
not understand what the system is doing. Sometimes,
when an ECM system has been in place for many years,
people may know that it’s still running in the back office,
but have no idea what the benefits are or how to use it.
When there’s no visibility into the system and nobody
knows what it’s supposed to be doing, that capital
investment goes to waste.
Documenting your paperless systems helps ensure
consistency, which has long-term benefits for end users
and the organization. It also helps the vendor support
team to see what was installed and in place, making it
easier to address any problems or upgrade the system.
Measuring The Impact Of The
Paperless Process
While individual circumstances are always a factor,
following these six steps should allow an organization to
achieve the goal of a paperless process in less than 90
days. But now that you’re paperless, how do you measure
the success of the initiative?
On a high level, have you achieved your goals and
fulfilled the mission of going paperless in fewer than 90
days? On a day-to-day level, has the paperless process
improved your employees’ work life and job satisfaction?
To assess the system installation and setup, start by
looking at how well you’ve digitized those three areas
discussed at the outset: capturing, routing and retrieving
information.
1. Capturing information:
Are you able to quickly capture all of your
documents in your ECM system? Have you
reduced the number of redundant copies? If you’re
capturing information effectively, you shouldn’t see
people printing out copies for their own records to
track it themselves.
2. Routing information:
Are you able to process documents quickly in a
digital workflow? One way to measure this is by
how long it takes to process approvals. If it used
to take five days and now it takes one day or less,
that’s a big improvement.
Documenting Your Process
Documenting your paperless systems helps ensure
consistency, with long-term benefits for end users
and the organization.
Launch A Paperless Process In Less Than 90 Days 8
3. Retrieving information:
How quickly and easily are employees able to find
the files stored in your system? A good gauge of
success in this regard is how confident your end
users are that they could go back and retrieve a
document when they need it.
In the end, the main reason for most companies to go
paperless is to improve efficiency, so that you’re able
to take on more business with the same number of
employees. Doing before and after comparisons of your
essential business processes should give you a good
understanding of everything you’ve achieved by going
paperless.
If you’re ready to take the
next step toward launching a
paperless process, having a
Return on Investment (ROI)
target, and plan to achieve it, is
essential to reaching your goals.
DocuWare has developed a financial model
that provides a custom and comprehensive ROI
analysis. Use this analysis to identify the best
opportunities to get maximum business impact
from your investment based on your business
needs and target processes.
Sign up today for a no-obligation ROI consultation.
It’s free!
DEVELOP A CUSTOM ROI ANALYSIS
About DocuWare
DocuWare is one of the world’s leading document management software
companies. Its solutions are available in 70 countries and 16 languages,
with over 125,000 users in approximately 14,000 installations.
The company, founded in 1988, operates worldwide from Germering near
Munich, Germany, New Windsor, New York, and Wallingford, Connecticut,
with subsidiaries in the U.K., Spain and France.
For more information please visit our website at
WWW.DOCUWARE.COM
