Maintaining compliance is a major challenge when you’re using paper-based processes, and one that has real consequences for your bottom line, business risk and customer satisfaction. Fortunately, enterprise content management (ECM) solutions offer a variety of ways to reduce your compliance headaches, operating costs and risk exposure.
One of the main problems with paper documents is that it’s difficult to retrieve them quickly in the event of an audit. You might have that contract or tax return somewhere in your files, but if you can’t produce it, you could be at risk for non-compliance.
In terms of day-to-day operations, employees must spend large amounts of time on manual processes, and there are ongoing costs for paper, physical document storage and delivery. There’s also a loss of efficiency that hurts your organization’s agility.
Here’s an example of these problems in a highly regulated industry: The retail brokerage division at a large financial services firm was using time-consuming, paper-based processes to onboard new investors. From the time a broker signed up a customer to actually managing their money, 45 days would go by — if all went well. If problems arose, it could take over 90 days before the client had access to their money and their information.