Why Should You Care About Paper Reduction and Process Transformation?

For years, AIIM has advocated the reduction of paper in business. Reducing paper is a good way to save office space and improve records retrieval. But, in the past 10 years, the focus has shifted to removing paper from business processes in order to improve productivity, accessibility, and compliance.

But, according to AIIM research, despite the widespread acceptance that reducing and removing paper is a best practice, there is a huge difference between the best performers and the laggards.

Piles of paper contrast with clear desks, postbags, and delivery vans contrast with mobile capture, warehouses full of boxes contrast with electronic archives, and forms-based processes contrast with automated workflows.

Why should you care about paper reduction and process transformation? Here's what our research is telling us:

• The speed of business is accelerating -> 68% of respondents agree that business-at-the-speed-of-paper will be “unacceptable in just a few years’ time.”

• Paper is visible as a problem -> 46% consider that the biggest single productivity improvement for most of their business processes is to remove the paper.

• Management still not focused on the problem -> Lack of management initiatives and the (perceived) need for physical signatures are given as the top reasons why there is still so much paper in business processes. Paper flowing through processes is decreasing for 46% of organizations, increasing for 25%.