Paper Free – A Journey, Not A Destination

The modern workplace is evolving. With the recent temporary, enforced transition to remote working, businesses across the country have undergone seismic cultural and operational shifts that few could have predicted. As a result, more and more organisations are exploring the concept of ‘paper free’ as a necessary part of their digital transformation.

Even before we became a work from home nation, research commissioned by our parent company SCC revealed that – out of a UK panel of 550 IT decision makers – 26% said their business has already gone paper free, and 29% planned to do so within five years.

Realistically, few businesses are ready to park paper for good. But taking the two steps to becoming ‘paper-lite’ in the short term can help businesses unleash significant workplace productivity gains and free up valuable resources.

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In 1975, BusinessWeek predicted that ‘desktop TVs’ would eliminate the need for hard copies of documents by the mid-90s – but this prediction hasn’t yet come to fruition. While some offices use more paper than others, sustainability organisation WRAP estimates the average office worker uses up to 45 sheets of paper per day – over half of which is considered waste.

Print is the starting point for manageable change, and getting your print under control is step one when it comes to running a paper-lite office. Managed print services deliver data from your printer fleet for full insight into device performance and consumable use – including paper and ink.

As well as supporting a more sustainable and efficient print environment, fleet data can help you identify and implement processes to encourage users to reduce their reliance on paper.

Digitise more

Did you know that the average employee spends 32% of their time each week on document related tasks? How about that a massive 3 hours and 27 minutes is spent searching for documents each week? That’s over an hour longer than the men’s marathon world record! In a world where Google has long shaped how we look for information, paper can be a real productivity roadblock.

Digitisation of documents is essential to unlocking access to information in a way that is natural to the user. Gaining control over how documents – of any kind – are stored, shared and secured can free your workforce from the time and resource requirements that come with physical information management.

Are you ready to go from paper-lite to paper free?

Encouragingly, reduced reliance on paper – whether for security, environmental or efficiency reasons – is quickly becoming the norm, with 45% of those surveyed in SCC’s IT Insights Report using less paper than a year ago.

But the journey to paper free is an evolution, not a revolution. To shape, support and empower future workforces, taking steps towards a paper-lite organisation must be underpinned by three fully-integrated pillars – the capture of information, the processing of information and the routing of information.

At SCC Document Services, paper, IT and workflows converge to help give businesses freedom to focus, freedom of choice and choice to work freely. We pride ourselves on integrating end-to-end document solutions that work with your organisation to minimise disruption and maximise agile working.

Find out how we can turn your document challenges into business continuity opportunities. Get in touch