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PAPER WARS
32
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.
Overall, 44% of organisations are only
10% towards their goal of paper-free
processes and 23% have yet to make any
progress whatsoever, including 22% of the
very largest organisations.
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, says that progress is taking
place, but believes its speed is being
hampered by 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?”
Ripe for digitisation
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 and
consultants 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?
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
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 to 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,
mostly printed prior to manual processing
(39%); 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 the 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
Doug Miles,
director,
AIIM Market
Intelligence
...progress is
taking place,
but its speed
is being
hampered
by lack of
management
drive.
Continued...
