The Top 5 Ways Paper Is Blocking Your Business
It is incredible to think that, in the 21st Century, we still rely heavily on a technology whose roots are over 2,000 years old – paper.
Paper takes a lot of time to process, is extremely error prone and has a detrimental impact on the environment.
And yet, even in the age of the internet and mobile apps, the use of paper has more than doubled in the last 20 years!
Today’s Employees enjoy massive productivity benefits using apps on their Smartphones. And they are beginning to seriously question why the companies they work for are still using paper for the majority of day to day operations.
The 5 biggest problems paper causes your business are:
1. Transcription Errors
How many times have you incorrectly written down a phone number? Unfortunately, I do this all the time and it seems that I’m not the only one. Studies have shown that transcription errors, typically the result of typographical mistakes, occur once in every 300 charcters typed. Can you spot mine?
2. Transposition Errors
A close friend of the transcription error is the transposition error, in which characters have switched places. This commonly occurs when a user is touch typing at speed. It is also extremely easy to do, particularly if you’re not writing down words but random characters instead:
This problem is compounded by the fact that the industrial environment is full of random character codes (e.g. Equipment Serial Numbers, Product Part Identifiers, Customer Codes etc.)
3. Delays
Paperwork is easily damaged and can often be lost (or mislaid) as it moves from outbox to inbox across the organisation. Data re-keying is also a time-consuming process as data processors are required to manually copy data from paper documents into back office systems; often having to decipher illegible handwriting. As a result, the business is unable to make decisions based on accurate, real-time information.
4. Poor Data Integrity
Business systems rely on accurate data accurate and up-to-date data in order to make the right operational decisions and (ultimately) produce accurate invoices. Transcription and transposition errors will generate bad data in back office systems and often, as a result, have financial implications for the business.
5. Printing, Storage & Searching Paper Archives
With the average worker consuming some 10,000 to 12,000 sheets of paper per year, the cost of purchasing, printing and storing it is considerable. This cost is further multiplied, if for instance, the paper documents have to be stored for many years due to legal reasons. Can you imagine how many filing cabinets would be required to store ten years’ worth of documents completed by 150 workers? Now can you imagine how difficult it would be to find a single document?
By capturing data digitally, these problems are eliminated from your operations. Data can automatically be validated as workers enter it into a mobile app, especially if you adopt barcodes or Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. These can therefore ensure that no transcription or transposition errors occur and as such maintain data integrity.
Capturing data using mobile apps eliminates the need for the potentially error-prone and time-consuming re-keying process. It will also save a lot of time, money , filing cabinets and trees!
For a case study on how Balfour Beatty replaced paper with mobile apps, barcodes and RFID tags, download by clicking here…