Digitisation of important documents has become extremely crucial as organisations strive to bring order to the chaos that has resulted from the unprecedented amounts of information that they create.
Driven by the need to achieve greater operational efficiencies, increase productivity and improve compliance, organisations are now trying to convert important documents, such as the company policies and procedures to digital web pages.
The future is digital workspace and to truly become a digital workspace, companies need to transform their analog information to digital and make it available whenever and wherever it is needed.
There are a lot of operational and legal benefits of digitising documents:
1. Improve Operational Efficiency
One of the biggest benefits of digital documents is the ability to find and access information whenever and wherever it is needed.
THE TYPICAL ENTERPRISE WITH 1,000 WORKERS WASTES $2.5M TO $3.5M/YEAR searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, or recreating information that can’t be found.
Source: IDC
Once the content available in analog formats like Word and PDF is converted to HTML, it becomes extremely easy to search for documents based on their metadata and the information inside them.
This frees up the staff to perform vital activities and help organisations reduce the cost of “The Paper Chase”.
2. Improve Mobility and Shareability
It is becoming increasingly important for information to be available not only in your physical workspace but also on a remote server that’s accessible to the entire team! A great example of this is the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Digital Documents make it easy for people to share and collaborate on documents from anywhere.
Organisations can improve efficiency by 25% by providing staff with remote access to company information.
Source: AIIM – Capitalizing on Content
3. Improve Security
Word and PDF documents are extremely vulnerable to security breaches. It’s easy for confidential information to fall into the wrong hands.
With Digital Documents, the organisation can control who has access to what information.
4. Reduce Cost of Lost Data
By using analog formats for their internal documents, policies and procedures, organisations spend enormous amounts of time, effort and money searching for lost and misfiled documents.
Misfiled or lost information can have a severe impact on decision making. According to a study conducted by Accenture – Nearly three out of five middle level managers (59 percent) miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just can not find it.
For Lost Documents, companies have to pay a cost of searching that is 6x the value of the original document. Source: Coopers & Lybrand
5. Improve Compliance
The regulatory environment is quite complex and ever-changing. The requirement for companies to comply with rules and regulations has led to a growing realisation that maintaining company documents in digital formats is extremely crucial.
With Digital Documents, it’s easy for organisations to quickly find the areas in their policies and procedures that need to be updated as a result of a change in regulations. Digital documents also ensure that employees always have access to the most up-to-date version of the document.
6. Better Accessibility
A considerable proportion of the workforce consists of people living with some form of disability. It’s important for an organisation to ensure that employees with disabilities can perceive, navigate and understand the company policies.
Policies and Procedures in analog formats like Word and PDF do not comply with the accessibility standards developed by W3C. Digitising these documents instantly makes them more accessible to people with disabilities without any additional expenditure by the organisation.
“Digital Documents” or “Web Documents” is much more than just scanning these documents and putting them online. It’s about having a system (like 1WordFlow) that converts the content in Word and PDF to web pages (a more accessible format), maintains a single source of truth, improves mobility, enhances compliance, and is secure.
