Paperless Office Software on the Rise as Companies Scale Back on Paper
Although the occasional dimwit says a paperless office isn’t the right way to a run a business, most companies are scaling back on paper in one way or another, and some are even noble enough to scale back on paper completely through use of paperless office software.
As winter nears and many trees are cut down for decoration in the home, the following industries are amped up by paperless business processes, demonstrating leadership for the national and global economy at large.
Retail
The automation that paperless office software provides, and will continue to provide, streamlines functions for supply chain and merchandise management in the retail industry. As an increasing number of retailers go public, the pressures to streamline supply chain management and merchandising efforts are stronger and more evident than ever.
Additional areas the retail industry has come to understand as imperative to growth are cash flow; information governance; reduced shipping, storage, and handling costs; and the management of products from a central repository—all of which paperless office software facilitates.
Not only do document management and similar technologies ensure safe and accurate management of retail products and their cash flow from a central data repository, its specific features, such as e-signature integration, help manage and close contracts with suppliers and other retail vendors in greater numbers and with greater closure rates/efficiency.
The digitization of the retail world, and the decreasing market share of brick and mortar stores, has made paperless office software an increasingly necessary imperative, as online shopping and payment verification require safe data retention and sophisticated content management capabilities.
Food and Beverage
The food and beverage industry offers many new compliance necessities in the 21st century, with The Food Safety and Modernization Act being one of the most imposing of these compliance necessities.
However, much like the retail industry, creating an efficient supply chain with all the paperwork required by the industry can be exhausting, costly, and downright ineffective without a paperless office software comprising a large part of any food and beverage organization’s central information repository.
Additionally, paperless office software as a central repository for organizations in the food and beverage industry stands to expedite the cash flow process, freeing up what would otherwise be human labor for more pressing issues that require high-order thinking, collaboration, and discussion.
The food and beverage industry also faces environmental concerns, and although organizations cannot directly control how consumers dispose of their waste, they can positively influence consumers in leading by example through relying exclusively on paperless office software to positively impact the environment.
Organizations within the industry can mitigate the negative impact of the industry as a whole has imposed on the environment by not only going paperless through ECM—but by clarifying the steps and processes needed to reduce environmental footprints via the secure, accurate information storage ECM provides.
Manufacturing
The manufacturing industry has been plagued by issues with cross-site collaboration for the past decade.
A manufacturing information system and its collaboration-enhancing features like workflow, e-signature integration, and file versioning can streamline cross-site collaboration between a manufacturing organization’s various branches and locations.
However, although these manufacturing information system and paperless office software features provide ancillary methods for overcoming cross-site collaboration issues, the satellite and remote access feature of a software like this drastically simplify cross-site collaboration, especially for auditing purposes.
Furthermore, without the centralized, highly secure information repository provides organizations in the manufacturing industry, information is seldom stored and accessed in a manner where manufacturing workers can make use of it.
For instance, based on a survey of 150 engineers in the manufacturing industry, Panzura, an enterprise infrastructure technology vendor, reports that 57% of these engineers must wait too long for files to update, 33% accidentally use incorrect or outdated parts because of incorrect documentation, and 22% are forced to redo work as a result of data loss or other incorrect project data.
All of the issues these manufacturing engineers report can be drastically mitigated, and even eliminated entirely, with an average paperless office software product offering.
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