In a recent AIIM survey, we asked organizations a simple question: “In the following processes, is the volume of paper increasing or decreasing?” The answers might surprise you.
| Process | % where paper is decreasing |
| Records management | 63% |
| Mortgage origination | 62% |
| Customer loyalty programs | 61% |
| Technical documents | 60% |
| HR (Recruitment and Applicant Tracking) | 59% |
| Supply chain management | 57% |
| Customer on-boarding | 56% |
| New account opening | 55% |
| HR (On-boarding, Employment Management, Off-boarding) | 54% |
| Patient care administration | 52% |
| Claims processing | 52% |
| Loan processing | 51% |
| Order fulfillment | 50% |
| Logistics | 49% |
| In-bound mail and forms | 47% |
| Contract management | 46% |
| Accounts Payable | 46% |
| Accounts Receivable | 44% |
| Manufacturing | 44% |
| Legal | 35% |
The reason I say the answers may surprise you is twofold. First, in an era in which most organizations at least claim that they are moving to digitize their business models, the percentages indicate that far from “digitally transforming,” many organizations still have a long way to go when it comes to automating the basic back-office processes that are the guts of any business.
The second source of surprise is that there are a number of core processes that frankly have been the “meat and potatoes” of the ECM industry for a long time – contracts management, accounts payable, accounts receivable, digital mailroom, and legal, to name a few – in which the majority of organizations have yet to attack the paper problem seriously.
I would argue that the “past” of ECM and process automation projects cast a long shadow. In the late 1990s, Enterprise Content Management became a mainstream technology (at least for large organizations) by first focusing on early adopters eager to automate high-value, mission-critical, and document-intensive processes critical to gaining competitive advantage. In this high-stakes environment, it didn’t really matter whether the technology was expensive, custom, and complicated.
A LOT has changed in the past five years as core content management, workflow, and capture technologies have dropped dramatically in cost, and pressures from mobile technologies and the cloud have made all this ECM stuff a LOT easier and more accessible to organizations of all sizes. Consider the following:
Let’s consider the most important business drivers for capture and workflow technologies. AIIM asked end user organizations to pick their top three:
| Improved searchability and shareability of business documents | 51% |
| Improved process productivity | 46% |
| Reduced physical storage space | 45% |
| Enabling anytime, anywhere content access | 32% |
| Improved collaboration | 30% |
| Records security and compliance | 26% |
| Faster response to customers/citizens/staff | 26% |
| Business continuity | 15% |
| Enabling content analytics/big data | 8% |
| Reduced postage/transportation and document logistics | 8% |
| Sustainability/environmental initiatives | 7% |
| Building move or facility rationalization | 5% |
So what’s the hold-up? One traditional obstacle has been the “signature” problem. 30% of organizations say, “We need physical signatures on paper,” even though for the most part they really don’t, and for 22%, signatures are the primary reason why paper is retained.
Another obstacle has been truly understanding process flows and the need to keep documents that are “born digital” in digital form. 40% of organizations say, “Most of the documents we scan are unchanged from printer to scanner,” begging the question of why they were ever printed in the first place. 30% say, “Most of the electronic invoices we receive still get printed at some point.”
AIIM asked experienced end users to identify the top three difficulties encountered in their capture and workflow implementations, and the results are revealing:
The good news is that these aren’t technology issues. Core capture and workflow technologies are mature and they work. For organizations just getting started, the core capture and workflow requirements necessary to address the above issues center around security, productivity, efficiency, and simplicity.