Posted by: Karen Cummings in Best Practices
Topic: Enterprise Management
Every year we look back over the previous year’s experiences and make New Year’s Resolutions; those sometimes lofty goals that propel us forward and help to “better ourselves.” Businesses are no different. Due to the economic shakeup underway around the world, this year organization leaders will be forced to be especially strategic with their 2009 plans, needing solutions that enhance productivity, but cut costs. One might call it the “Now – more than ever” philosophy. Now – more than ever – companies are recognizing that highly targeted IT initiatives with meaningful returns and faster paybacks are key goals.
Based on the early indicators we have been seeing from leading Multifunction Printer (MFP) vendors and the document capture market, here are five resolutions on many organizations’ list for 2009:
1. Support for Corporate Green Initiatives
Consumers and business alike have been criticized on their environmental impact over the years. While still a higher priority in Europe as compared to the US, the drive for companies to produce a “greener” corporate environment with a reduced carbon footprint have pushed executives to re-focus on many aspects of their core business, in particular, their paper consumption. With an effective and well-implemented document capture and routing solution, the movement of paper documents becomes part of the electronic document workflow with direct reductions in paper consumption as well as the costs related to shipping and storing paper documents, including gas consumption, courier costs, overnight mail costs and off- and on-site storage space.
2. Focus on Productivity Enhancements
Consistent with the softening economy, new technology solutions will be implemented based on how they accomplish these top corporate priorities: increase revenue, increase productivity, reduce costs or a combination of all three. New technology projects that do not address at least one of these imperatives will be moved to the bottom of the project list, or eliminated all together. Innovative document capture and routing solutions can:
a. Increase revenue for professional services companies that bill for scanning activities
b. Increase productivity by automating document-intensive processes and workflows
c. Eliminate specific costs by:
i. Reducing print-related hard costs
ii. Decreasing labor-intensive manual processes
iii. Consolidating hardware and service agreements related to printing and document capture
3. Leverage/Expand IT Infrastructure
Similar to the individuals vowing to budget and live within their means, companies are re-assessing their existing infrastructure to determine how to leverage what is already in place. Solutions that integrate with and utilize existing technology will be implemented first before a company will invest in new IT infrastructure. For example, some document capture and routing solutions can expand a company’s existing enterprise fax infrastructure or content management system to integrate both paper and electronic documents from virtually any source, resulting in less-manual, more-efficient workflows.
4. Reduction of Enterprise-Wide Mandates
In the past, many IT and document-related or record handling policies were handled on a corporate level. Today, as companies focus on reducing costs while increasing productivity, new initiatives are being encouraged and implemented at the department level to deliver workflow-specific solutions. Think of it as the business version of do-it-yourself home projects, forcing us all to learn skills we’ve paid others to do for us in the past.
5. Alignment of Paper and Electronic Documents and Records
After years of maintaining separate document processes, infrastructure and record retention policies, companies are aligning paper and electronic document workflows to provide consistency, increase productivity, and reduce manual processes. Further, as these processes come together, documents are now archived and searchable making them highly accessible and available for enterprise search and e-discovery.
Of course, the trick with resolutions is putting them into action. Just like that personal fitness plan you’ve been meaning to kick into gear for the last four years, nothing will happen if you don’t start now. In the spirit of the New Year, let’s take a lesson from previous years of procrastination so that we don’t kick ourselves come December!
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