Blog: How the pandemic highlighted the paperless revolution

Over the last two years, businesses all over the world have had to embrace paperless ways of working. But achieving this in an effective way proved to be much easier said than done.

Within a very short space of time, organisations had to deal with the reality of employees being almost completely unable to access physical documents. As a result, they had to deploy new technologies that would enable secure virtual access to the information within those documents. But as remote working has turned from a short-term necessity into a long-term reality, these technologies have become a core part of how businesses operate.

In this blog, we’ll explore the importance of paperless documents, how to get a paperless strategy right, and the key innovations that support it.

Why is going paperless so important?

Moving towards paperless document services might sound like a relatively minor change to business operations. But the reality is that it can have a significant positive impact in a number of different areas:

• Office space: lower demand for physical office space, combined with the expense of business real estate (particularly in London), means companies are exploring ways to make significant savings in their office costs. As well as reducing desk space, cutting out filing or post room space can make a major contribution.
• Environment: removing the need to print out documents not only saves paper and ink but also saves the energy needed to create and distribute those documents. This makes business operations more environmentally friendly and supports sustainability credentials.
• Expectations: just like customers, employees have rising expectations around the technology they use day-to-day, and how easy it is for them to do their jobs. Businesses must give their workforce user-friendly and up-to-date technology, including smooth virtual document access, in order to remain competitive in the job market.
• Regulations: data protection laws are stricter than ever, and the demands on businesses are only likely to increase. Virtual document services make it much easier to keep information safe, ensure regulatory compliance, and prove that compliance if required.
• Adaptability: regulations and the business landscape have changed significantly in recent years, and are likely to evolve again in the months and years to come. Virtual services ensure that businesses can stay agile and keep document access smooth and secure, whatever the future may hold.

How to make the shift to paperless

Going paperless can be tricky to implement, especially if the process is entirely undertaken in-house. There are three keys to a successful paperless migration, and all of them work best with the support of an expert partner and their underlying technology:

• Flexibility: businesses need to put in place a solution that can scale up and down as business demands require. This means that a document services solution that’s fixed in price and terms is unsuitable, as it can easily lead to companies paying for services they don’t need or finding that their solution can’t cope with increasing demand. This is why the ability to return equipment and software licences early if they’re no longer required is so important.
• Security: while the security of information delivery to users is vital, the ways in which physical documents are processed for virtual distribution are often overlooked. A good paperless strategy should therefore include a Digital Inbound Mail solution, where inbound mail is delivered to a secure facility, where it’s scanned and indexed before being delivered electronically to the recipient.
• Integration: with so much information being distributed to so many different people, a core part of a paperless strategy is easy management and oversight of how documents are processed and accessed. This is where a content services platform like SCC UVu comes into its own, giving companies a unified view of their business processes, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations, and helping them understand where they can make improvements.

SCC’s suite of Document Services solutions can help you move towards an agile business future.