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BUSINESS PROCESSES
Our conflicted attitude to paper
is laid bare in the latest
Paper
Wars
survey conducted by AIIM,
the independent information
management analysts.
Two thirds (68%) of the 450
business people surveyed for
Paper
Wars 2014 – an update from the
battlefield
said that ‘business-at-the-
speed-of-paper’ will be ‘unacceptable
in just a few years’ time’, and around
half said that the biggest single
productivity improvement would be to
remove paper from their organisation.
However, only one in five
respondents has a board-level
endorsed policy to reduce paper use;
and in one in five (21%) organisations
paper use is actually increasing.
Businesses that do manage
to reduce paper report increased
productivity and enhanced customer
service as a result, with 60% achieving
ROI on their paper-free projects within
12 months and more than three-
quarters seeing ROI within 18 months.
Why, then, are organisations so slow
to drive paper from their business?
Doug Miles, director of AIIM
Market Intelligence, blames a lack of
management drive.
“Progress is being made on paper-
free processes and in a number of
areas, specifically invoice processing,
it’s moving really quite quickly. But
whenever you attempt to change a
process within an organisation there
are more people who will give you
reasons why not to do it than will give
you reasons to do it,” he said.
“It tends to be when a process
comes up for review that people
decide it’s time to get rid of paper,
rather than having the initiative from
above or having it writ large on the
operations department wall: How do
we get rid of paper in this process?
What’s the next candidate? What’s
the candidate after that?”
According to AIIM’s 2013
Paper Wars
study, the most
popular candidates for digitisation
are internal HR (e.g. expenses,
timesheets, on-boarding), cited
by 65% of respondents, followed
by accounts payable (62%) and
customer correspondence (62%). But
how do you decide what process to
address first?
Miles advises businesses to focus
on processes that are hampering
their ability to respond to internal
and external customers.
“Any process in which the time
cycle is dictated by how long it
takes to get a piece of mail from the
customer or from a branch office
to head office or from head office
to employees should be reviewed.
The one thing any process analysis
should ask is how much core work
is there going on in this process?
Well, it’s three days. How long is
the end-to-end process taking? It’s
taking 20 days. Why is that? Because
things have to go backwards and
forwards. How do they go backwards
and forwards? On paper. If you can
send them backwards and forwards
electronically, you might be able to
get the process time back to the core
objective of a few hours,” he said.
Miles says that doing so may not
improve out and out productivity, but
it will enable you to provide better
customer service and will give you
greater visibility, which in the case of
invoice processing is often a greater
benefit than faster payment processes.
“Your ability to manage your cash
goes up enormously when you know
just how many invoices are at point
of payment. You don’t have to pay
them any sooner, but knowing you
could if you wanted is one of the
bigger benefits,” he said.
“The other big benefit is from
consolidating accounts payable
duties. If you have branches all over
Europe or the US and each has
an accounts payable function with
a clerk, a financial controller and
two or three process people, you
could instead receive all invoices
electronically to one spot and
process them electronically.”
Invoice processing is a good
workflow to make paperless: a)
because on average, 44% of invoices
already arrive in electronic form
(PDF, Fax, EDI) – even though 59%
of these will end up as a paper copy;
and b) because it is the one you can
get closest to not having to re-key any
information.
“Once you’ve worked out the
different lay-outs, you can OCR an
invoice and pull-off customer number,
invoice number, line items ordered. If
you’ve got the delivery note, you can
check that against the invoice. A big
proportion of that can be hands-free.
If you’ve got a three-point matching,
as they call it in SAP, then you can
pay without needing any hands-on.
That’s where you get a lot of pure
productivity benefits,” explained Miles.
“The other processes in which
we see much quicker progress are
things like insurance claims: the
assessor can be out there and
take a photograph of the damage
and submit it by mobile phone; the
form gets filled in on a tablet and
the whole thing is in process within
hours, rather than days.”
Miles points out that the benefits
of electronic processing are equally
valid for less defined case-based
processes.
“Case-based processes tend to
involve less predictable routes and
less predictable participants. For
example, a claims benefit payment
might involve input from a number
of different people and you may
have to present several people
with the contents of a case folder.
Doing that on paper restricts the
whole collaboration. The person who
has the case folder sitting on their
desk can see it, but no one else
can. That’s not very conducive to
getting the thing done. As soon as it
becomes paper-free, everybody sees
the same content,” he said.
Lack of imagination
Digital mailrooms, the scanning
of documents ‘at the door’ and
then routing them to the recipient
electronically, seems like an obvious
way to reduce paper use. Yet,
according to
Paper Wars
, just one in
four organisations has such a strategy.
“A lot of it is due to lack of
The latest
Paper Wars
research from AIIM shows slow progress towards
paperless processes. James Goulding spoke to Doug Miles, director of AIIM
Market Intelligence, to find out why so many organisations still rely on paper
and what processes one should digitise first
It won’t be over
by Christmas
Doug Miles,
director, AIIM
Market Intelligence
Continued...
