Paper-To-Digital Business Process Automation
How It Affects Businesses and the Economy

The workflow lets the employee know if additional documentation is required. When approval is granted, a bar-coded cover sheet is created which the employee adds to any follow-up documentation required. Once a teacher’s time off is established, the solution initiates a workflow to automatically locate a substitute replacement.

Benefits and results:
Previously, teachers filled out leave of absence requests with three pieces of paper—payroll, HR and employee forms—and waited through a lengthy approval process. Now they simply enter a request on-line in approximately 30 seconds, often receiving approval in minutes.

After initial successes in HR, the school realized the potential of their paper-to-digital process automation solution. The school district has moved toward an enterprise-level deployment of 1,100 contributing users that is vastly growing, accessed by more than 30,000 students, parents and teachers.

Additional benefits include:

• Digitizing required student documents on a day-forward basis reduces or eliminates the cost to rent or build new storage space.
• Publishing digitally rather than on paper saves an estimated $38,000 annually.
• Reducing mail cuts down on fuel, time filing documents, postage.
• Previously, a paper calendar was sent monthly to 24,000 students. Now each school’s website links to a digital calendar in the ECM system, saving printing, photocopying, and time.
• Teachers of special-needs students can share information more easily.
• By law, monthly staff meetings with agendas distributed to 3,000 teachers. Materials are now posted electronically and teachers notified by e-mail.
• Digital storage of employee files: The district now scans documents directly into its ECM system. The HR department has digitized 800,000 papers to date and performs day forward scanning so all new documents are electronic.

Small, Medium and Large Organizations Benefit
These are just two examples of how digitizing and automating processes has allowed very different types of organizations to save tremendous amounts of time and money—in more ways than they initially anticipated. There are affordable, easy-to-use solutions that help all types of entities—from SMB to enterprise—achieve substantial efficiencies, costsavings and ROI. In today’s economy, deploying these types of solutions not only ensures that companies stay viable, but that they in fact thrive by providing better products and services while staying within tight budgets.

Paper Facts
The cost of depending upon paper to store and communicate business critical information continues to climb. Investing in the paper, toner and the energy to print, fax, ship or courier information—and the time required to do that—is increasingly expensive. Below are some facts about how business operations and profits are impacted by paper:

• 80% of information is still retained on paper¹
• Cost to file a document = $20²
• Cost of searching for a misfiled document = $120²
• Cost of recreating a lost document = $250²
• A 4-drawer file cabinet with 15,000-20,000 files costs $25,000 to fill and $2,000 to maintain³
• The average worker prints 10,000 pages per year and wastes 1,410 pages⁴
• The average cost of a wasted page is six cents⁴
• A company with 500 employees spends an average of $42,000 per year on wasted prints.⁴

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¹ CAP Ventures

² Inc. Magazine

³ futurelawoffice.com

⁴ The Citigroup-Environmental Defense Partnership to Improve Office Paper Management